The “tragedy” of love, its failure does not describe its course in the sense in which one says that a relationship has ended ‘tragically’ or ‘has failed’. It is the origin of the movement of love as a movement of mutual distancing from the self.
The subjects of love assert themselves by starting to free themselves from themselves, their old identities, in order to enter a new alliance of love and a new relationship to the self in the interplay of this distancing from the self. This does not make them any the less cheerful, light-hearted or decisive. The movement of love is the common coupled movement of loving singularities who are united by nothing other than their will to love and this will’s decision in favour of the other. Lovers are united by being disunited. The reality character of love is this disunity, this conflict. Love is based on conflict, on turbulence, on the polemos of love. It is the “bearing out” (Heidegger) of absolute differences, of irreducible difference: the event of propriation itself as love, as diaphora.
The subject of love can only grasp itself as the subject of this conflict. It has to admit the other as a radical limitation to the self in order to come to enjoy the genuine intensity of love, i.e. its non-narcissistic extension of the self in the other. The loving subject is the subject of enjoyment. What it enjoys is never itself. It does not enjoy its self and it does not enjoy the other self as a kind of missing half.
Loving subjects are separated. In contradistinction to the cut halves of the spherical human being in Plato’s Symposium, they are originarily divided. They never were one. They do not complement each other as a somewhat stupid convention demands. The unsettledness of lovers is the passion for what is not complementary. The subject of love desires what overtaxes it rather than resting within the horizon of a shared origin.
The community of lovers is the chaotic community of subjects who in common touch the chaos, the abyss of love. Lovers touch each other by trying to touch each other where they lose themselves. For to touch chaos means to make contact with the polemos of love, the depth of that which does not have any ground. The subjects of love exchange their gazes and their embraces over the abyss of groundlessness; they reassure each other by agreeing on the awareness of a shared insecurity. For to love means to go through the dangers of an ontological uncertainty that permeates the loving subjects’ entire being. The absence of the loved one is part of the reality of love just as much as the loved one’s presence. The subject of love, as Agamben says,[9] must maintain the alien loved being “in its alienness and its distance”; it maintains even in “the closest proximity” to this being a kind of transcendental distance, i.e. a distance which enables the very being, the otherness, of the other being.
Distance is just as much a part of love as closeness. For the closeness of love as it is expressed in the community of loving subjects is itself nothing other than this experience of distance which is part of the experience of otherness. This is the violence of love, the peculiar pressure testified to in every eventuation of love. The common element of love is not harmony, complementation, economy. The specific harmonia of lovers is the conflict which rages in the daughters of Ares and Aphrodite between war and love. Lovers are raging subjects. The cosmos of love is too manifold to be controlled or ordered, or to be melodic like a beautiful adornment. The universe of lovers is as old as the universe itself. But the universe, if we want to thus name the totality of being in its incomprehensibility, is not the cosmos. It is the chaos of becoming and vanishing, the spectacle of an irreducible and therefore unfathomable multiplicity of movements and events.
In this spectacle, the loving subjects touch one another like strangers, as if the subject would poke a finger into the void. Where the other is, there is nothing. The other is absolute otherness, untouchability itself. Nevertheless, love is different in every way from the devotion to nothingness in nihilism. For the nothingness of the other which the loving subject touches and fondles is the other’s ‘essence’. It is this nothingness without therefore being null and void. To be nothingness like the other is means to be everything: pure indeterminacy as complete virtuality. The essence of love lies in the insubstantiality of the lovers who, as absolute singularities, touch each other in untouchable places.