LOVE FOR SALE
Love seems like a capitalist plot. The prospect of falling in love and the process associated with it form the lifeblood of many corporations—those dedicated to the sale of diamond rings, roses, chocolate truffles, flights to Paris, and so on. The ways of love that redound to benefit of capitalism are not visible only on February 14. It is difficult to look at the array of commodities available in today’s world and not see in almost every one some influence of the fantasy of falling in love. Gym memberships, diet soda, mascara, and leather jackets all hold within them the potential to render us worthy of love. Perhaps no one goes to the gym consciously trying to create a lovable body, but keeping oneself in proper shape has some relationship to acquiring and keeping a lover. Those who are fit tend to have much better prospects.1
The commodity status of love becomes clearest in the case of dating services. The dating service is not simply a refuge for those who fail at falling in love on their own and therefore require assistance. Instead, it provides the paradigm for love in the capitalist system. Its structure is so significant that it is almost impossible to understand how love operates within capitalism without examining the structure of the dating service. One often turns to a dating service out of desperation, and it is this desperation that gives the dating service its revelatory power.
One pays the dating service for the possibility of falling in love. Unlike the gym or the jewelry store, it offers a direct path to love. I sign up in hopes of finding someone with whom I might fall in love without having to go to the trouble of sculpting my body or finding the perfect necklace that would render me worthy of love. The directness of the dating service is the source of the ignominy attached to it. But this direct route provided by the dating service lays bare the commodity status of love under capitalism even more clearly than the advertisements surrounding Valentine’s Day. This clarity stems from the way the dating service arranges compatible partners.
The dating service demands that clients list their favorable qualities. When I compile such a list, I portray myself as a desirable and potentially lovable commodity. I offer myself up to the dating service for others to examine, test-drive, and perhaps purchase. To do this, I must transform myself into a series of qualities and preferences that function as an advertisement for myself. The features that render me more appealing as a commodity are necessarily the ones that I emphasize, and I pass over in silence the features that would lessen my exchange value. I highlight my sense of humor and my doctorate in macroeconomics while making no mention of my baldness and chronic bad breath. Even my preferences become part of my commodity status. My love for the outdoors or for watching classic movies helps to render me more appealing. Preferences advertise me as much as qualities do. This mode of self-presentation reveals that one must transform oneself into a commodity when one embarks on the quest for love.
But in addition to exposing the commodity structure of love in the capitalist universe, the dating service enables subjects to bypass the inherently traumatic nature of the love encounter. The list of desirable qualities that I provide the dating service is the key to the service’s ideological function. Such a list attempts to remove the trauma of love by eliminating its unforeseen power, its ability to attack the subject at the most inconvenient time and in the most unanticipated form. Though we may have a particular type that we find attractive, the beloved doesn’t necessarily fit this type. In fact, we can fall in love with someone because she or he isn’t the sort of object that usually appeals to us, not because she or he is. The dating service tries to mask the unexpectedness of love by making it thoroughly predictable. The dating service transforms love from a disruption into a stable structure for one’s life.4
Like the typical commodity, love always keeps the subject coming back for more. One seeks either to rekindle love with one’s partner or to find someone new. In terms of love’s connection to the commodity, there is no difference between renewing one’s vows, going on a second honeymoon, and leaving one’s spouse for a newer model. In each case, the subject experiences the dissatisfaction associated with having the commodity and seeks a new form of the commodity in order to ameliorate that dissatisfaction. Novelty is crucial to keeping love alive within capitalism, even if novelty involves varying relations with the same person. The logic of the commodity rules in the domain of love. One purchase is never enough, despite the claims that the salesperson at the dating service or the priest at the wedding makes.
The existence of the dating service in some form or another is not a recent phenomenon. Though no shadchan had an online presence until recently, the activity of this Jewish matchmaker appears very early in the recorded history of the Jews. But the dating service changes the nature of the office that the matchmaker performs, just as contemporary capitalism changes the nature of love. The dating service is a synecdoche for capitalist society as such. When I go to the dating service, I seek love as an object available for purchase, and this is the form in which love appears throughout the capitalist universe.
Love that one can purchase is no longer love, however. It is romance. Though capitalism appears to rely heavily on love, it necessitates a transformation from love to romance. This is capitalism’s ideological operation in the domain of love. By transforming love into romance and thus into a commodity, capitalism provides respite from the trauma of love. Capitalist society loves to talk about love, but even as it does so, it remakes love, which involves an object that we can’t have, into romance, which involves an object that we can.
OBTAINING WHAT YOU DON’T WANT
Both romance and love begin with desire. The subject sees an other that provokes its desire and hopes that this other will respond by reciprocating this desire. The difference between romance and love is that the former never leaves the terrain of desire. The subject seeking romance sees in the other the possibility of the realization of its desire and thereby reduces the love object to an object of desire. This is why romance inevitably produces disappointment.
Love, though it disturbs the subject, does not disappoint. In love, one can find satisfaction with the love object. But love also removes the subject from the terrain of desire. Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the other’s satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire. Love targets the point at which the subject exceeds itself and is not self-identical. According to Joan Copjec, “when one loves something, one loves something in it that is more than itself, its nonidentity to itself.”5 We seek love to escape the constraints of our symbolic identity and to enjoy our nonidentity. In the act of love, one abandons oneself.
The first great theorization of love occurs in Plato’s Symposium. Here Plato recounts seven different versions of love that various characters in the dialogue describe in their speeches. The dialogue takes place at a banquet held in honor of Agathon, who has just won a prize for one of his tragedies. One of the participants, Eryximachus, proposes that instead of the typical entertainment they should each offer a speech in praise of love. Led by Socrates, all of the participants agree, and what follows in the dialogue are six distinct conceptions of the role that love plays in existence. When Alcibiades arrives late and disrupts the proceedings, he adds a seventh contribution after Socrates apparently has the final word.
Though many interpreters of Plato have clung to the Socratic discourse that associates love with knowledge, what stands out about the dialogue is not so much its content as its form, which is unique among Plato’s dialogues. Through the formal structure, the dialogue offers the key to its content. The idea of love finds expression through disruptions that occur amid the dialogue. The key moments of the dialogue do not occur in any of the speeches but in the interruption of their continuity. By including these interruptions and giving them a prominent role in the dialogue’s form, Plato creates an association of love itself with disruption. Love, for Plato, interrupts the everyday life and the stability of the subject. It confronts the subject with what doesn’t respond in the way that the subject expects.
The second disruption occurs near the end of the dialogue after Socrates gives what we think will be the final speech. Once he concludes, Plato describes a drunken Alcibiades, shouting outside the house, who comes in to join the party. Eryximachus soon convinces Alcibiades to offer his own speech as the others have. Though he agrees, Alcibiades also changes the terms governing the speeches. He will praise Socrates himself rather than love. This praise of Socrates (which includes a great deal of critique) portrays him, even if Alcibiades is not aware of this, as incapable of love. Plato ends his dialogue about love with an instance of how love can fail.
Alcibiades proclaims his great desire for Socrates throughout his speech, and yet Socrates never responds to this desire with his own desire. What makes Socrates incapable of love, despite all the efforts of Alcibiades to seduce him, is the nature of his desire. As Plato portrays him, Socrates is a figure of purity, and it is his purity that acts as a barrier to love.7 During his encomium to Socrates, Alcibiades stresses again and again the purity of Socrates. At one point, he claims, “Believe me, it couldn’t matter less to him whether a boy is beautiful. You can’t imagine how little he cares whether a person is beautiful, or rich, or famous or in any other way that most people admire. He considers all these possessions beneath contempt, and that’s exactly how he considers all of us as well.”
8 Socrates attaches himself to nothing and refuses the objects that others give themselves over to. As a figure of purity, he avoids succumbing to the disruptiveness of the other, and it is the ability to succumb to this disruptiveness that is the precondition for love.
9
The disruptions that mar the speeches on love occur in the form of the Symposium, but the content equally points to the disruption as the crucial ingredient in love. Love is never reducible to the image of harmony for any of Plato’s speakers, which is what separates his conception from capitalism’s idea of romance. Love emerges out of a disruption, and it lives on through dissymmetry. Even the speech of Aristophanes, which seems like a monument to harmony, actually illustrates the necessary dissymmetry in love. Aristophanes describes love as finding one’s other half, which was lost through the cut introduced by Zeus, who found humans too self-satisfied when they were whole. But as Juan Pablo Lucchelli perspicaciously points out, the emphasis in the speech that Aristophanes gives is not on the achievement of perfect complementarity with one’s missing half in love (a conception of love as finding one’s soul mate) but on the cut that generates the search for the love object. The cut and the dissymmetry that it introduces are essential in Plato’s vision of love.
THE TREES OF ROMANCE AND THE FOREST OF LOVE
Though Plato remarkably theorizes the disruptiveness of love, most thinkers in the capitalist world fail to separate love from romance. Even important anticapitalist thinkers often fall into this trap. Though they grasp love’s disruptiveness, they nonetheless theorize grasp the satisfaction that the subject finds in love. For such thinkers, love is inherently impossible because it never achieves the harmony that it promises. When we think of love in terms of romance, its failure becomes apparent, though we fail to think of this failure as love’s form of success, which is precisely what Plato, in his own way, is able to do.
Speaking subjects are not capable of love due to their superiority to other beings but due to the way in which language renders the subject’s self-division explicit. One loves the failure of the beloved object to achieve self-identity and not any specific trait (except insofar as it embodies this failure). This is why someone genuinely in love cannot give the reasons for the love that she or he feels. Once there are reasons, one has left love and entered into romance. The self-division of the beloved object is the cause of love. This removes the beloved object completely from the terrain of the commodity with its initial promise of plenitude and subsequent disappointing lack. In a romance the object returns to this terrain and becomes obtainable, but, at the same time, it loses the lack that it has in love. Romance transforms the beloved object’s self-division into an identifiable, positive trait the dating service can explicate and target for the would-be lover.
The transformation of love into romance attempts to keep love in the field of desire and fantasy. We alternate between these two, but we avoid the trauma of loving. The difference between desire and love concerns the response of the object. As long as we desire without loving, we remain on safe ground. We can pursue the lost object through a series of inadequate replacements and endure the disappointment that follows from each successful acquisition of the object, whether in the sex act or at the shopping mall.
In Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougement was the first to theorize the distinction between love and romance. Though Rougement does not discuss romance explicitly as a commodity, his framing of this distinction already anticipates the association of romance with the logic of capitalism. For Rougement, we opt for romance over love in order to keep our desire alive. He notes, “unless the course of love is being hindered there is no ‘romance’; and it is romance that we revel in—that is to say, the self-consciousness, intensity, variations, and delays of passion.”14 Romance here is the obstruction of love, the delay in its realization. Romance, as Rougement sees it, allows us to continue to desire and to avoid the act of love. By transforming love into romance, capitalist society allows us to continue desiring. We can treat the love object like any other commodity and thereby escape its exceptional danger.
Though we tend to associate monogamy with the repressive demands of capitalist society, one is almost tempted to call monogamy an anticapitalist practice. In contrast, the subject who moves from object to object in romantic life follows the logic of accumulation. Even if this subject avoids the capitalist fantasy and doesn’t believe that any one object will have the final secret, it is often the equally compelling fantasy of quantity that drives this activity. One believes that accumulating a vast quantity of romantic objects will unlock the secret of the ultimate satisfaction, which is exactly the fantasy capitalism proffers.15 But love, in contrast to romance, doesn’t provide anything for the subject to accumulate. Instead of contributing to the subject’s wealth, it takes away from it.
THE TRIP BEYOND NARCISSISM
Even though love puts the other in the ego’s stead, the relation is always rockier than the narcissistic one. Narcissism is ultimately a disappointing relation that the subject cannot indefinitely sustain, but the love object traumatizes the subject in a way the ego cannot. The ego is just an image, an ideal that the subject has constructed for itself, but in love the image is always incomplete. The other has the capacity to elicit the subject’s love insofar as it remains irreducible to its image.
Initially, this irreducibility to the image provokes our desire. We desire what we can’t see in the image on the basis of what we can. That is to say, the beloved object does not just remain a desired object. Our desire evokes the desire of the object, and love involves the encounter of these overlapping desires. The encounter with the desire emanating from the beloved object transforms love into an experience different from desire. Desire enables the subject to remain at a distance that love obliterates. Herein lies the radicality of love in relation to desire.
The beloved object’s response gives love its disruptiveness. In love, what we can’t see reaches back toward us. This is a point that Lacan makes in his seminar devoted to the phenomenon of the transference (and a lengthy reading of Plato’s Symposium), which includes his most sustained discussion of love. He claims, “love is what passes in this object toward which we hold out our hand through our own desire, and which, at the moment when our desire makes its fire break out, allows for an instant this response to appear to us, this other hand that is held out toward us as the other’s desire.”17 Where desire encounters the illusion of an object at the point where it expected something substantial, love encounters what it didn’t expect to encounter.18
Love in an act of proximity. The lover refuses to remain at a safe distance and bombards the subject with its mode of satisfaction, a mode of satisfaction around which the subject must try to orient itself. This satisfaction is what we almost always recoil from, but in the act of love we embrace it. This is why lovers can accompany each other in the most private moments: they can tell each other their most revelatory dreams or allow the other into the bathroom with them. What would alienate or even repulse everyone else becomes integral to the love relation.
In Being and Event and elsewhere throughout his philosophy, Alain Badiou grants love an evental status, locating it among what he calls the four truth procedures. This inclusion of love seems anomalous. In comparison with the other three truth procedures, love doesn’t fit in. When one reads Being and Event for the first time, one can’t help but feel that the conception of the love event represents a philosophical misstep on Badiou’s part, a case where he allowed his own private emotions to have an undue impact on his philosophy. Though Badiou may like the feeling of being in love, this hardly justifies its status as a truth procedure.
But Badiou classifies love alongside the other truth procedures for its disruptiveness of everyday life and—which is in some sense to say the same thing—for its ability to arouse the subject’s passion. Love may be an anomalous truth procedure, but perhaps this is because it is the paradigmatic truth procedure. Love’s disruption of our everyday life is much more palpable than that of politics, art, or science. The subject in love feels as if it can’t exist without the beloved, while even Galileo himself didn’t feel this strongly about the scientific event in which he participated. It is much easier to imagine subjects dying for the sake of love than for the sake of the twelve-tone system of modern music. This is because love has a disruptiveness that transcends the other truth procedures.
Capitalist society’s packaging of love as romance aims at eliminating the disruptiveness of love while sustaining its passion. This is an impossible task, and the love of the capitalist subject is always a diminished love insofar as it’s safer. Romance under capitalism is a form of investment, and even a risky investment, as romance sometimes is, remains within the calculus of risk and loss. Love transcends any calculus and forces the subject to abandon its identity entirely, not simply stake its reputation or its fortune.
LEAVING THE NINETY-NINE FOR THE ONE
As a result of this change, those in love care much less about how others outside of the beloved see them. They are willing to act strangely in public or draw attention to themselves in embarrassing ways because the only recognition that counts is that bestowed by the beloved. Lovers in high school have no problem engaging in officially prohibited public displays of affection because they represent the only real authority for each other. School officials’ interdiction of suggestive kissing or touching during school hours bespeaks their recognition that such displays explicitly call their authority into question. The social authority undergoes a radical diminution in its capacity to grant recognition when someone is in love. This transformation grants enormous power to the beloved and, at the same time, lessens the power of the social order over the subject.23
This explains the disdain that both Romeo and Juliet show for the most entrenched feeling of their respective families. Even though their love requires them to abandon the hatred their families have preached throughout their entire lives, Romeo and Juliet have no problem taking this step. The family as a figure of social authority becomes simply an external obstacle that they must navigate, not a psychic barrier to their love. This is because, for each, the family simply ceases to matter. Romeo and Juliet will go to any length, including the betrayal of their family traditions, for the love of the other.
But in the ideology of romance this loss of identity becomes an investment that one makes in the future secure possession of the romantic object. Romance promises that the initial trauma will lead to a stable relation, and it offers the lover a new symbolic identity. One can become a husband or a wife or a spouse: in each case, the subject gains recognition from the romantic attachment. Rather than sustaining the disruption, we turn it into an investment and move on to the possession of the object.
Not only does romance transform love into an investment, but it plays a crucial role in the development of capitalism by suggesting to consumers that they can find the perfect commodity, the commodity that will create wholeness for them. Every act of consumption has its basis in an attempt to access the lost object, to find the perfect commodity that would provide an ultimate and lasting satisfaction. Although this fantasy underlies every purchase of a commodity, with most commodities we see easily through the illusion. Very few buy a roll of toilet paper thinking that they’ve found their lost object once and for all. With a Twinkie, the fantasy becomes more tenable. But with a romantic object, one can fully invest oneself in the promise of the object. Romance immerses subjects in the capitalist fantasy of the perfectly satisfying commodity, and this commodity has a precise name—the soul mate.
ROMANTIC COMEDIES AND LOVE COMEDIES
The romantic comedy genre is constructed around the idea that love is a good investment, that love is reducible to romance and the acquisition of the soul mate. Though such films often show love to be inconvenient, difficult, or disruptive, they always conclude with a sense that love helps one turn a profit in terms of social (and often financial) status. It is almost impossible for love to cost someone either social recognition or economic well-being within the universe of the romantic comedy. Romantic comedies play with the traumatic impact of love, but they almost inevitably conclude by eliminating this trauma for the sake of a romantic bargain.26
Romantic comedies sacrifice this initial excitement in order to pass quickly over the traumatic disturbance that occurs when couples fall in love. The act of falling in love disrupts every aspect of one’s life. Even the quotidian details of one’s life become charged with anticipation and concern. By compressing this traumatic time in a montage sequence, the romantic comedy assures us that love can take place without any traumatic disruption. Love can simply be romance.28
If we look at the most famous romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts, we can examine the romanticization of love in an almost pure form. Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990) depicts Roberts in her breakout role as prostitute Vivian Ward who falls in love with a rich client, Edward Lewis (Richard Gere). Initially, the recently single multimillionaire Edward hires Vivian to accompany him rather than have sex with him, and they subsequently fall in love during a week together. The film ends, as this genre almost always does, with their romantic union. Though Edward’s friends balk at his relationship with a prostitute, and his commitment to her flags at times during the film, he decides in the end to become her partner rather than her client. The relationship has the effect of pulling Vivian out of her working-class position as a prostitute and into the upper class. Falling in love doesn’t disrupt her social identity and class status but dramatically lifts both. Love, for Vivian, is a good investment.
Of course, Edward falls in love with Vivian because she doesn’t seem to be looking to him for social advancement. Despite his suspicions at one point, she doesn’t value him for his social utility but simply falls in love with him. The film insists on the authenticity of Vivian’s love for Edward, but at the same time, it does depict her receiving clear monetary and social rewards for this love. Edward forces store employees to treat her like a wealthy client rather than a working-class prostitute, and he also takes her to dine in fine restaurants. When he comes for her at the end of the film, he does so in a limousine. Even though Vivian is not trying to profit from love, she does, and this is the point that the film highlights. Within the dictates of capitalism, love becomes profitable even when we don’t enter it looking for a profit. The logic of capitalism permeates the disruptiveness of love and transforms it into romance.
If Pretty Woman establishes Julia Roberts as a Hollywood star, Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1999) makes use of this status. Unlike the earlier film, it emphasizes the persistence of the love object even where it appears most evidently to be a romantic commodity. Whereas Pretty Woman depicts Roberts as an inexpensive commodity in the form of a prostitute, in Notting Hill she is Anna Scott, the most famous actress in the world, and she meets William (Hugh Grant) when she walks into his London bookshop. In the same way that Edward is a good investment for Vivian, Anna is a good investment for William, and this seems a driving force of his attraction to her. But Notting Hill makes clear that love disrupts the lives of both subjects involved and isn’t such a good investment after all.
For her part, love with William forces Anna to endure public exposure: the legions of reporters that follow her see her leaving William’s apartment, and this creates a huge scandal. The film concludes with her implicit declaration of love for him at a press conference. Throughout the film, Anna seeks privacy and refuge from the public, but in order to love William, she must abandon herself to the public’s look. She has to give up her insistence on having a private life removed from the public world. To be in love is to be seen in a way that we don’t want to be seen, and nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Anna Scott in Notting Hill. In this sense, she represents the counterpart of Vivian in Pretty Woman, who concludes the film being seen just as she wants to be.
The romantic comedy may be the most ideological genre that Hollywood produces, but it also has its moments where authentic love breaks through. Love works against the logic of acquisition that dominates the capitalist universe, and if acquisition of the object takes place at the conclusion of almost every romantic comedy, there are also occasions when characters must confront the other’s lack along with their own. When this happens, the romantic comedy becomes a love comedy and ceases to be the ideological handmaiden of the capitalist universe that produced it.