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
Even if we are unfit and have long odds for acquiring an actual lover, capitalism provides almost infinite opportunities for the fantasy of love. The romance novelist sells love through an impossible fantasy scenario, and even the video game manufacturer promises the social outcast the possibility of heroism that would make this outcast worthy of love. Beer commercials promise love relations if we choose the proper beer, and jewelry advertisements assure us that our proposal will be accepted if we purchase the proper ring.2 There seems to be no terrain free of the fantasy of love within the capitalist universe. Though love emerges earlier in human history than capitalism, it appears as if capitalism invented love ex nihilo, given how useful it has become for fostering the subject’s investment in capitalist relations of production.
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 the dating service doesn’t simply require that prospective lovers list their qualities and preferences. They must also choose what they want in their love object. After purchasing an account at the dating service, I must create a profile of my desires, and the service will attempt to match my desires with the appropriate object. For instance, I tell the service that I prefer men in their forties with brown eyes who like to read crime fiction and play chess. Just as I go into a grocery store with a shopping list for the items that I believe will realize my desire, I provide the dating service with a description of the characteristics that I find desirable in a romantic partner. But unlike at the grocery store, I go to the dating service in search of love, not just a carton of ice cream that would provide an inherently fleeting satisfaction for my desire.
The commodity that the dating service sells is much more valuable than those sold by the grocery store because it carries with it the illusion of a complete satisfaction. No one believes that eating a particular kind of ice cream will provide such a lasting satisfaction that I will never desire ice cream again, but many in capitalist society believe that finding one’s soul mate will permanently solve the problem of desire for a love object. This difference bespeaks the pivotal role love has within capitalism. It is not just one commodity among many but the central commodity. One might say that all other commodities are modeled on the love object rather than vice versa.3
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
The permanence attached to the love object is central to the role that love plays within capitalism. Though many people use dating services just to discover temporary sexual partners, the idea of finding a permanent relation looms large for the clients of these services. Even if marriage goes completely out of style, the idea of loving someone else “forever” probably will not. This idea is not purely ideological. It reflects the ability of love to disrupt the course of everyday life and to introduce the eternal into the temporal. But it also reflects the promise inherent in every commodity, the promise of a permanent fulfillment of one’s desire that the commodity will never keep.
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.
The distinction between love and romance is essential for an analysis of the psychic appeal of capitalism. Romance domesticates the trauma of love, but it doesn’t eliminate it altogether. Capitalism gives love such a central place in its workings and encourages subjects to devote so much of their time to it because the trauma of the love encounter enlivens them and keeps them going. Without the traumatic satisfaction that love provides, life often ceases to seem worth living. While it relies on love, capitalism must contain its fundamental disruptiveness and mitigate its trauma so that the capitalist system can continue to function. This is what the transformation from love to romance aims at accomplishing. Though love isn’t a capitalist plot, romance is. Romance enables us to touch love’s disruptiveness while avoiding its full traumatic ramifications.
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.
When one falls in love, one loses all sense of oneself and one’s symbolic coordinates. Love is never a good investment for the subject, and this separates it definitively from romance. This is why capitalism necessitates the transformation of love into romance. This transformation allows us to love on the cheap. Many theorists of love, like Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, have remarked on love’s inherent disruptiveness. But this is apparent as early as Plato’s approach to the question of love.
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.
The structure of the dialogue has occasioned much speculation about where the voice of Plato resides. Unlike more straightforward dialogues that follow a narrative trajectory (like the Phaedo or the Republic), there is no clear sense of development from one speech to the next. Each speech appears to stand on its own and have an intrinsic validity that the latter speeches do not often directly call into question. It is thus tempting to contend either that Plato is not taking a side or that he sides with Socrates, who is supposed to be the final speaker and often, of course, functions as Plato’s stand-in. But the identification of Plato with Socrates is complicated by the role that two other characters play in the dialogue. Alcibiades intrudes and upsets Socrates’ position as the source of the last word on love, and, what’s more, it is Aristophanes, not Socrates, who offers the most sophisticated and memorable speech about love.6
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 first disruption in the Symposium occurs after Pausanias concludes his speech and gives the floor to Aristophanes. The latter is unable to take his proper turn due to a case of the hiccups. The hiccups mark a break within the announced program. Aristophanes must delay and allow to Eryximachus to take his place in the order. The speech of Eryximachus, who is a physician, has the effect (as he himself predicts) of curing Aristophanes of his hiccups, and Aristophanes is able to speak at length after Eryximachus finishes.
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
Plato ends the Symposium with Socrates walking off into the sunrise as his interlocutors all drift to sleep. This final image of the dialogue emphasizes the purity of his desire as well as his removal from the terrain of love. While Alcibiades portrays Socrates as incapable of love, his speech emphasizes the power of Socrates to disrupt his everyday life and make life unlivable for him. Though Alcibiades concludes the Symposium with an account of the failure of love, he does sustain the emphasis on disruption that manifests itself throughout the dialogue. For Plato, love resides in disruption.
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.
This emphasis on dissymmetry holds not just in the speech of Aristophanes but throughout the dialogue. Though some conception of harmony appears in each speech, the sense of dissymmetry is always more significant. According to Lucchelli, “in the Symposium, at no moment is the asymmetry between the beloved and lover completely flattened. The whole dialogue turns around this gap and one could postulate that Plato held to it until the end, when the intervention of Alcibiades pushes this dissymmetry to the extreme.”10 The dissymmetry of love leaves the loving subject in a permanent condition of disruption, and yet this disruption is the source of the satisfaction that love provides. The subject in love enjoys its inability to stabilize its relation with the love object, and this is what Plato makes clear in the Symposium. It is the first great treatise of love because it is the first great treatise of disruption.
One can never have the love of the other because one loves what the other doesn’t itself have. Even when the other desires us, something in the other remains outside our control. To subdue fully the otherness of the other and master it would effectively eliminate the other as a lovable entity. Thus, a successful love would destroy its object at the exact moment it achieved total success. Love always leaves the subject with a sense of its failure or incompletion, but this incompletion must be experienced as the indication of love’s authenticity rather than its absence.
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.
This problem of love preoccupies Jean-Paul Sartre and receives its most eloquent exposition in his chapter on “Concrete Relations with Others” in Being and Nothingness. According to Sartre, love necessarily involves the lover in an intractable contradiction. He claims, “Love is a contradictory effort to surmount the factual negation while preserving the internal negation. I demand that the Other love me and I do everything possible to realize my project; but if the Other loves me, he radically deceives me by his very love. I demanded of him that he should found my being as a privileged object by maintaining himself as pure subjectivity confronting me; and as soon as he loves me he experiences me as subject and is swallowed up in his objectivity confronting my subjectivity.”11 What Sartre diagnoses here is the impossibility of love modeled on the capitalist ideal of the accumulation of commodities. He doesn’t see how love might accomplish the impossible and enable the lover to confront the beloved in the form of a loving subject. Love is a contradiction, and yet it occurs. But Sartre can only see it as an ontological impossibility because he imagines love as romance.12
Romance eliminates the lost object that predominates in love and replaces it with the object of desire. This flight from the lost object and from loss as such occurs throughout the capitalist universe, but nowhere is it as apparent as in the domain of love. In a love relationship, I cannot have the object but rather love the object through its absence. There is always something missing in love, which is what enables the love relation to endure. In love the subject confronts the incompletion of the beloved object, how this object is fundamentally at odds with itself. When one falls in love, it is precisely this noncoincidence of the beloved object with itself that triggers the fall. The apparently self-identical object, like a contact lens or a blow-up doll, is not an adequate object for love because it lacks the explicit self-division that makes love possible.13
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.
Romance, in contrast to love, doesn’t allow the subject to confront the beloved object as such. Once the beloved object has the status of a commodity that the subject can acquire, it paradoxically ceases to be attainable. Like every other commodity, the romantic object promises what it doesn’t deliver. Even if one goes to the dating service with an exhaustive list of one’s preferences, the commodity one obtains will inevitably be disappointing. In this precise sense, there is no difference between a romantic partner and a vacuum cleaner.
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
Throughout most of his seminars, Jacques Lacan attacks love as a narcissistic illusion. When the subject loves, it places the other in exactly the same position that the ego occupies in the narcissistic relation. Both narcissism and love enable the subject to short-circuit the relationship with social authority while still remaining within the domain of that authority. One feels free without having to endure the groundlessness of actual freedom. Though he does see the possibility of an exception, Lacan says in a statement representative of his overall attitude, “love is only accessible on the condition that it remains always narrowly narcissistic.”16 While in love with someone else, one loves oneself through this other. No one feels like a narcissist when she or he loves, but this is just the result of love’s deception. Nonetheless, narcissism is not the last word on love.
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
The response from the beloved—“the hand held out toward us”—jolts the subject out of its everyday existence. One cannot predict this moment or work to bring it into being, and it thus appears as a secular miracle. In love the object does not stay in its proper position. The response to desire forces the subject to change its life entirely without any clear guidance as to how it should do so. Inasmuch as it strips away all possibility of an ordinary life, love suffuses the subject with satisfaction. Life no longer just goes on.
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.
We know that someone is in love when the beloved’s most repellant qualities undergo a complete reversal of valence. A person’s unpleasant smell, slovenly attire, or obnoxious eating habits become appealing quirks rather than reasons for keeping a distance. The lover embraces the most unflattering characteristics of the beloved and treats them as sublime indexes of the beloved’s worth. The unpleasant odor resulting from a refusal to shower, for instance, would become an indication of the beloved object’s disdain for obsessive daily rituals with which others waste their time. There is no quality so universally negative that it could not undergo this transubstantiation in the act of love: fat can become cuddliness, emaciation can become fitness, bad attire can become idiosyncratic style, and so on. In contrast to desire, love depends on the embrace of what is undesirable in the object.19
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.
Unlike politics, art, and science, love seems to be an isolated phenomenon. A love event—the relationship of Jill and Dave, for instance—doesn’t have the same world-historical impact as the French Revolution or the invention of twelve-tone music (examples of the political and artistic event from Badiou). Even a love event that garners great attention, like the affair between Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abélard, fails to produces the type of substantive changes accomplished by the storming of the Bastille.
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.
The cynical approach to love fails to register this disruptiveness. According to Badiou, the cynic contends that “love is only a variant of generalized hedonism,” and this cynicism enables one to avoid “every profound and authentic experience of otherness from which love is woven.”20 Dismissing the reality of love—seeing it as just a capitalist plot—is a way of avoiding the transformation that it demands, but it also leaves one’s existence bereft of significance.21 The passion that love arouses impels subjects to continue to go on.
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
The risk that occurs in love stems from the status the lover grants to the beloved. The beloved ceases to be just another object that the lover desires and takes the place of social authority itself. When I love the other, I want to count for this other more than any recognition that might come from society at large. I want to matter more than everyone else put together.22 For the lover, the other must value her or him not just above all else, but she or he must replace all else as the basis for the calculation of value. To put it in the terms of psychoanalysis, love demands that the little other take over the function of the big Other.
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.
Degrading oneself for the sake of the beloved reveals the disruptiveness of the love relation. The person in love agrees to sacrifice social identity for the sake of winning the other’s love. When in love, all other considerations disappear before the response of the beloved. This experience of a complete loss of one’s usual coordinates is at once the appeal and the trauma of love. Though we tend to think of love as a pleasant experience, it actually produces much more suffering than pleasure. We feel pleasure when our lives move along smoothly and with relative security, but love is always rocky and insecure. As we fall in love, we can never be sure if the other truly loves us in return, and we spend our time worrying about what the other is doing. This is why it is easy to picture the lover phoning a beloved an abundance of times when there is no answer. The lover experiences of the trauma of love with each unrequited phone call.24 Life no longer just goes on when we love. Instead, it bombards us with a series of traumatic jolts that preclude any peace of mind. Our very symbolic identity loses its stable coordinates.
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.
When we talk about finding or having found our soul mate (if we do), we do not believe ourselves to be immersed in the capitalist economy. But this is an even more important terrain for capitalism than the convenience store where we buy a soda and candy bar or the stock exchange floor where companies are financed. The idea of the soul mate plays a crucial role in the promulgation of consumption. If I believe that a perfect commodity exists in the romantic field, this changes my relationship to all commodities. Commodities become more attractive insofar as each one stands in for the perfect partner. Though a hammer at the hardware store most likely cannot function as my soul mate, I will find more pleasure in purchasing it with the idea of an ideal commodity informing the purchase, and this is what the soul mate provides. That is to say, the idea of the soul mate underwrites all consumption within the capitalist universe.
The soul mate is the commodity in the form of the subject’s complement. This is why the idea of the soul mate has such importance for capitalism. The subject experiences itself as lacking whenever it desires, and no object can fill this lack. But the promise of the soul mate is the promise of completion, an object that would complement the lacking subject perfectly and thereby ameliorate its lack. No such complement exists outside of ideological fantasies, but capitalism requires subjects who invest themselves in such fantasies.25
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
The attitude that the romantic comedy takes toward love—its romanticization of love or transformation of love into a commodity—manifests itself in the montage sequences that populate almost every entry in the genre.27 Typically, the montage shows the couple just after the relationship begins as they are starting to fall in love. We see them walking in the park, eating in a restaurant, feeding each other ice cream, going to the movies, or even having sex. What is striking about these montage sequences is that they elide the part of the relationship that is the most exciting—the act of falling in love itself. They show the couple falling in love, but they do so in a montage that minimizes rather than extends the time that this takes. If Hollywood usually takes seriously Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary claim that “movies are real life with the boring parts cut out,” then the elision of the initial stages of relationships seems shocking. As anyone who has fallen in love knows, the beginning is not the boring part.
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.
But Pretty Woman cannot entirely avoid a depiction of love’s disruptiveness and remain an enjoyable film. If love were only romance in the film, it would not remain one of the most appreciated romantic comedies in the history of Hollywood. There must be a kernel of authentic love in even the most ideological romances, or else they would fail entirely. These fragments of authenticity are evident when we see Edward’s friend Philip Stuckey (Jason Alexander) make sexual advances on Vivian when he learns of her occupation. Though Vivian rebuffs him, his action eventually forces Edward to abandon him as a friend. Edward’s love for Vivian has the same effect on her: she loses her connection with her best friend and roommate Kit (Laura San Giacomo) because of her relationship with Edward. Though the film minimizes these disruptions, it nonetheless includes them as indications of the effect of love. Love is primarily romance in Pretty Woman, but there are points at which love manifests itself.
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.
William commits himself to Anna completely, but he continually discovers what he doesn’t expect to find. Even though Anna is a fantasy object for William and the other characters in the film, she doesn’t fit smoothly into his daily life. Whenever their relationship seems to gain a foothold, she abandons him or inadvertently reminds him of his lesser social status. For instance, when she invites him to visit her hotel, he comes expecting to spend time alone with her. But he arrives amid press interviews for Anna’s new film, and he must talk to her in the guise of a journalist interviewing a film star. When Anna finally professes her love for William, he has her earlier abandonments in mind and rejects her, not wanting to submit himself to another trauma. Though he eventually tracks Anna down and makes it clear to her that he has changed his mind, this first rejection reveals the danger associated with Anna’s love for William.
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.
The replacement of love with romance reduces the danger involved with love. Though one still replaces the social authority with an individual other, this other, within the logic of romance, has the endorsement of the social authority. Thus transformed, love can make the lover feel better about her or his social status while in love, while authentic love should render the question of social status insignificant. The subject in love abandons the recognition of the Other or social authority for the recognition of the love object. Romance dilutes this act by replacing the love object with a socially authorized object. The result is an impoverished form of love—love without the traumatic core that makes love worth experiencing.29
It is easy to see how the capitalist system uses love as a marketing strategy and as a model for all accumulation. In the midst of this transformation of love into romance, it is difficult to keep sight of love’s disruptiveness. Capitalism delivers us from it while simultaneously permitting us to believe that we remain within the orbit of love. But in the process, it robs us of the events that make our life worth living. Opting for romance instead of love is the profitable choice, but it costs us everything.