An Impromptu Essay on Love in Postmodernity (2022; 3305 words)
Have I been young? No but I have loved.
Have I been beautiful? No but I have loved.
Have I been in life? No but I have loved.
Have I been beautiful? No but I have loved.
Have I been in life? No but I have loved.
Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, director, 1964, Denmark)1
This essay examines images of love from art, film, and television as the vantage point for inventing a theory of essence in postmodernity. I retreat for a moment from notions as such that essence does not exist in postmodernity or that today’s conversations and critique have no place for the word, essence. I first visit and compare images of love to learn what love in postmodernity might be and what it does: love which is an affect engenders real change in us postmodern lovers whose actual bodies remain unchanged. It is love which relies on our senses for a sensation of a feeling of the imperceivable reality, real change, and real movement in our actual bodies. And the actual bodies which are capable of containing real change and real movement are ones which each exist in essence. In other words, our existence in essence, which is as imperceivable as reality, is what relates us to reality, the real change and movement engendered by an affect. As long as love in postmodernity is an affect, which the images of love in this essay tell, without essence we cannot love. As long as we believe in love, we postmodern lovers ought to exist in essence and understand essence’s capacity and risks. This essay has no conclusion, as it is a philosophical exercise based on a symptomology of the images of love. It is only groundwork for further philosophical practice on images of love, essence, and something which is not yet known. In this way, the essay’s methodology follows that of Gilles Deleuze: his taxonomy of the image in cinema is not about cinema but is a passage to a philosophical practice of concepts.2 Similarly, this essay on love in postmodernity is not about love.
Essence, which will be further clarified and justified later in this essay, is one which is living and not fixed: it has the capacity to contain real change and real movement and the power to really transform those who each exist in it. I owe most of my language and belief to: Henri Bergson whose philosophy breaks us out of the long European fixity of essence and redefines essence in the matter of the body (“the image”) in continual change and continuous becoming;3 Gilles Deleuze whose philosophy insists on the mode of existence which believes in the body and in reality;4 Michel Foucault whose philosophy calls for bodies and pleasures in place of sex and desire and gestures toward reality and realization;5 and Anne Dufourmantelle whose philosophy on gentleness resonates to what essence is and its power.6
Love
Love exists. Even those that are skeptical of love that is natural and organic would have to admit that, logically, love has already been created performatively7 and brought into existence. It has been uttered, depicted, and embodied. That love– the word as a body in its own living essence and relation to reality – and images of love have been created support the idea that love exists; and what has once been created and given living essence cannot be made nonexistent. That in postmodernity love no longer exists and has been replaced by desire is only a notion. Not to mention postmodernity is only a section within time which is not a real section but an actual one that is discursively compartmentalized and dressed. What postmodernity (postmodern thoughts, words, and images) as its own body does have, however, is a force to affect, in this case, love. While it cannot kill love, it can engender change in love.
But what kind of love are we discussing today? For clear comparison between images of love and an education of postmodern love, we ought not to mix love and desire. It might be helpful to revisit Foucault’s distinction between “bodies and pleasures” and “sex and desire”: “We must not place sex on the side of reality, and sexuality on that of confused ideas and illusions; sexuality is a very real historical formation…. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality [by the technologies of power] ought not to be sex and desire, but bodies and pleasures” (shortened).8 And we get a glimpse of hope for a distinction between sex and desire – to move sex away from the side of desire and more toward the side of reality – when Foucault cites D. H. Lawrence: “‘There has been so much action in the past,’… ‘especially sexual action, a wearying repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself’” (emphasis mine).9 Realized sex is something to think about. But for this essay, in the effort to focus on love only, let’s put aside the spectral quality of sex – and of bodies, pleasures, desire, and love for that matter – and begin to describe the kind of love and the kind of images of love that can be juxtaposed as clearly as possible to sex and desire. Love which is in thought rather than in action. Love which is on the side of reality rather than of actuality. Love which is understanding of and interest in each other and what they share, e.g., experience, time, space, and memory. Love which lurks in between these shared moments. Love which is not a repetition but a continuation. Our kind of love.
fig. 1
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Progress of Love: Love Letters, 1771-72
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Progress of Love: Love Letters, 1771-72
fig. 2
Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, director, 2022, South Korea)
Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, director, 2022, South Korea)
Selected images of our kind of love include: for a representative image anterior to postmodernity, Jean Honoré Fragonard’s painting The Progress of Love: Love Letters (1771-72); and for what love in postmodernity might be in comparison, film Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, director, 2022, South Korea), television series My Liberation Notes (Park Hae-young, writer, 2022, South Korea), and film In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, director, 2000, Hong Kong).
The Progress of Love is an ensemble of six large paintings: The Progress of Love: The Pursuit (1771-72); The Meeting(1771-72); The Lover Crowned (1771-72); Love Letters (1771-72); Reverie (1790-91); Love Triumphant (1790-91). The advantage of reviewing Fragonard’s Progress is that it is little concerned with a sequence or a narrative of a singular, exemplary love in linearity, unlike what the title conveys: the work was created with no literary nor pictorial source and only placed in a sequence by the artist based on site-specificity rather than a narrative;10 and the idea of one single or right sequence seems irrelevant, especially for, as Fragonard scholar Pierre Rosenberg notes, the artist’s “taste for improvisation” and “lack of concern for narrative exposition and exactitude.”11 Instead, the Progress in nonlinearity can be considered a work which depicts and separates various kinds of love among which is our kind of love. For example, Reverie suggests love which is, unlike our kind of love, adult and pornographic: the seated figure leans against the column on top of which the sundial confirms it is midday, the “hour of the shepherds” and “willing shepherdesses in the verdant meadows beyond”; and poses with one hand in her lap, conjuring an association to “books that can only be read with one hand.”12 Whereas Love Letters (fig. 1) suggests love which is friendship, fidelity, and concord: an unshod statue of a woman holds a heart in her right hand and beyond Cupid’s reach, symbolizing friendship; the ivy and the spaniel symbolize friendship and fidelity; and “the woman lays her hand on her companion’s shoulder, and he inclines his head to hers, both gestures symbolizing marital concord, or concordia maritalis.”13
In Love Letters, we have two lovers: the woman sits on the pedestal, holding and looking at a love letter; and the man stands right by with his head on her shoulder, holds her, and amorously looks upward at her face. Numerous letters by the woman’s side suggest that they are looking over past correspondences. In comparison to the other paintings, especially the first three in the Progress, Love Letters uses: softer brush strokes, softer edges, and lower contrast in the trees, the grass, and, although slightly, the lovers’ garments and their faces; and a composition which suggests that the lovers are isolated in some secret part of the garden. Unlike the first three in the Progress that are full of passion, desire, and vivacity, Love Letters evokes senses including: that of time spent together in calm; that of deep understanding and trust; that of stillness and no interest in action nor physical/actual movement; and that of the clandestine. And the poster of Decision to Leave (North American version; fig. 2), too, evokes the same senses. In it, two lovers stand together at the edge of the cliff where they are alone and by a chalk outline of a body that is no longer there (the clandestine); they are handcuffed to each other, yet the posture of neither suggests they are about to deny or run from the situation (stillness, understanding, and trust); and in the out-of-focus mountainous peaks, trees, and, although slightly, the lovers is a rather painterly quality for the photographic image (time).
Despite the evocation of the same senses, the two images present stark differences; and in the differences we look for what love in postmodernity might be. Love in Love Letters relies on explicit and actual contiguity of the lovers. There is a clear distinction between the subject and the object, as the woman (the subject) looks at the letter (the object) and the man (the subject) at the woman (the object). And love is declared in the form of letters. Whereas love in Decision to Leaverelies on implicit and virtual or real contiguity of the lovers through the shared terrain or membrane or memory,14 as they, with no direct touch between their bodies, only each stand on the same cliff and stay bounded to the same handcuff. A distinction between the subject and the object becomes both impossible and irrelevant, as there is no direct interaction with nor gaze at each other. And there is no such declaration of love on their laconic faces. In addition, the sense of the clandestine is much heightened with the handcuff and the chalk outline, suggestive of a crime scene. In short, love in postmodernity, unlike the anterior, exists only in the realm of reality: real and not actual contiguity, no subject-object distinction, no actual utterance which uncovers, and the very clandestine.
How do we say I love you? We don’t. In Decision to Leave, Hae-joon (the man) says to Seo-rae (the woman), “I’m completely shattered”; they do not need utter the word, love, by the time of the decision to leave; and only Seo-rae describes those words of Hae-joon in retrospect by saying, “when you said you love me.” In the phrase, “I’m completely shattered,” there is no action (verb) nor direction (the object) but only “I” (the subject). In it, Hae-joon describes the change that has taken place in him since meeting Seo-rae. He has been affected and therefore changed; he is really and not actually shattered. Perhaps love in postmodernity is exactly this: love as an affect. There are more examples in recent film and television. In My Liberation Notes, Mi-jeong (the woman) says to Mr. Gu (the man), “Worship me. So that when spring comes, you and I will have become different people” (emphasis mine); Mr. Gu asks, “How do you worship someone?”; Mi-jeong tells Mr. Gu, “You cheer them on. You tell them they can do anything and that everything is possible”; and Mr. Gu, through the rest of the series, worships Mi-jeong and says to her, “I worship you.” Through the particular choice of word, worship, the two reorient their love toward a dimension which is reality; and methodologically engage in the affect of cheering. According to Mi-jeong, the affect which is their love would change Mr. Gu and herself. Lastly in In the Mood for Love, Chow (the man) and Su (Mrs. Chan; the woman) spend much time together, eating, reenacting the habits of their spouses, rehearsing conversations, and writing a martial arts serial; as their feelings develop and by the door to the hotel room rented by Chow for writing, Su tells Chow, “We won’t be like them [their spouses who engage in love which is different from theirs, perhaps driven by sex and desire],” and leaves (emphasis mine); and Chow, at the end of the film, whispers inaudible words into a hole in a wall and fills the hole with mud. Their love remains deposited in the hole, again a dimension which is reality.
When love is an affect, it engenders real change in us lovers. That is also to say that our actual bodies remain unchanged. Love in postmodernity is actually unresolved and instead realized; for example, in the three postmodern images, Seo-rae leaves; Su and Chow carry on with their lives separately, and Su stays married perhaps to the same husband; and Mi-jeong and Mr. Gu end on a yet-to-be-resolved note as they reunite after long separation. Realized love requires that we each live with relation to and belief in reality. In love we are moved and changed by each other through affection; and the movement and the change are real ones and not actual ones that can be accounted in terms of capital, power, or physics. Also, note that real movement is different from transcendence: while both involve reality, real movement is movement in us and of the mind each with relation to reality and not movement to reality.
That a distinction between the subject and the object is irrelevant and that instead we have the subjective only – “I,” “we,” and “you and I” – also place us postmodern lovers on the side of reality. We, throughout intellectual history, have been collecting many names for reality, e.g., time, memory, alterity, the unthinkable, and the missing, among which is subjectivity. Subjectivity here is not subjectivity of the self but one which is beyond the self, the singular subject. It is beyond the structurally determined subject and object and beyond ideology.15 Deleuze, in his theory of cinema, says: “We are no longer faced with subjective or objective images; we are caught in a correlation between a perception-image and a camera-consciousness which transforms it (the question of knowing whether the image was objective or subjective is no longer raised). It is a very special kind of cinema which has acquired a taste for ‘making the camera felt.’”16 Our love is a very special kind of love which has acquired a taste for making reality, real subjectivity, felt. Only felt, for reality and our love, like the camera (Deleuze), are unsaid and hidden beneath and above. We are clandestine.
Essence
The lover is still wearing the same suit, the same hair, and the same face. The same body. Yet there is something different about them. The lover remains the same and is felt differently because the lover’s body exists in essence which is living and contains real change and not in one which has long been fixed per European thought since the Greeks – Dufourmantelle credits Deleuze and Bergson the insistence otherwise.17 Bergson’s philosophy redefines essence in the matter of the body (“the image”) in continual change and continuous becoming. In 1896, Bergson says, “Here I am in the presence of images” and calls “my body” an image; and these images, or our bodies, can be perceived by the senses and “from within by affections.”18 Further reading of his works, e.g., Creative Evolution (2012 [1907]), helps understand these images are actual forms and bodies each in and of essence which contains real movement and change:
… in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition. Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real. When the successive images do not differ from each other too much, we consider them all as the waxing and waning of a single mean image, or as the deformation of this image in different directions. And to this mean we really allude when we speak of the essence of a thing, or of the thing itself.19 / Whether the movement be qualitative [by qualities/adjectives] or evolutionary [by forms of essences/substantives] or extensive [by acts/verbs], the mind manages to take stable views of the instability.20
When Foucault calls for bodies and pleasures and when Deleuze’s belief in the body – “reaching the body before discourses, before words, before things are named”21 – and belief in reality become interchangeable, we might think about Bergson’s bodies (“images”) which exist in essence.
When Dufourmantelle describes gentleness, too, we might think about essence – what it is and what it does:
- “Life places gentleness within us originally.”22
- “Gentleness is a force of secret life-giving transformation” without which “there is no possibility for life to advance in its becoming.”23
- “Gentleness summons the body... that gentleness would embody and disembody at the same time” (shortened).24
- “Gentleness is a relationship to time that finds in the very pulsation of the present the feeling of a future and a past reconciled, that is, of a time that is not divided.”25 (Time here is reality.)
- “Gentleness... doesn’t speak well” (shortened).26
- “Invisible, gentleness lets itself be forgotten. As discreet and essential as a heartbeat.”27
- “Gentleness belongs to sensibility, whether or not it stimulates feelings. By feelings we are affected, by feelings are moved.”28
- “Gentleness involves the body... and the sensibility of a body that gentleness could have educated, elevated, ennobled. Its powers distilled by the senses.”29
That, if, our actual bodies are capable of containing real change and real movement means that our bodies each exist in essence. Essence (“gentleness”) that does not speak is as imperceivable and clandestine as reality and can only be felt through the senses; and it is essence in which we each singularly exist that relates us to reality that is our shared terrain, time, memory, subjectivity, alterity, the unthinkable…. Our love as an affect, the real change it engenders in us, our essence, and our reality are together clandestine.
If love in postmodernity brings melancholia, that it is unresolved – only realized – would not be the only reason. Love in postmodernity is unnatural, for the capacity of essence to contain change and its power to really transform us come with vulnerability and responsibility essence must bear. One, essence which is living bears “the responsibility of the living,” as Dufourmantelle would say:30 it must live in attunement with the world and all of the inadvertent events in it. Similarly, Dufourmantelle says, “No event in this world is foreign to it.”31 No event in this world is foreign to our essence which is itself clandestine and thus foreign.32 Our lovers would understand: Hae-joon, a detective, and Seo-rae, a suspect, meet over a murder; Mr. Gu, a total stranger and a very quiet one, moves into a small neighborhood and into the life of three local siblings, including Mi-jeong; and Chow’s and Su’s time together increases once they piece together the affair their spouses are having together. Two, essence which is clandestine must make itself felt by the senses. We laconic lovers, each in our own essence, must each tear away in silence from where we hide; and even then, we remain hidden. It hurts to lurk.
I said no conclusion but a petite conclusion
In postmodernity then, alongside sex and desire, are lovers in essence who sense and stumble. By existing in essence, postmodern lovers, you and I, are related to each other. I hope we can stumble together.
1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 1989 [1985], 171.
2 Deleuze, C2, 280: “A theory of cinema is not ‘about’ cinema…” (shortened).
3 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, 2004 [1896] and Creative Evolution, 2012 [1907].
4 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 1986 [1985] and Deleuze, C2.
5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volumn I: An Introduction, 1989 [1976].
6 Anne Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living, 2018 [2013].
7 Judith Butler describes performativity in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 2015, 28: “Performativity characterizes first and foremost that characteristic of linguistic utterances that in the moment of making the utterance makes something happen or brings some phenomenon into being.”
8 Foucault, THS, 157.
9 Foucault, THS, 157.
10 Colin B. Bailey, Fragonard’s Progress of Love at The Frick Collection, 2011, 71.
11 Bailey, FPLTFC, 33.
12 Bailey, FPLTFC, 32-33.
13 Bailey, FPLTFC, 69, 83-84
14 Deleuze, C2, 207: “a polarized membrane which is constantly making relative outsides and insides communicate or exchange, putting them in contact with each other, extending them, and referring them to each other”; “This membrane which makes the outside and the inside present to each other is called memory”; “For memory is clearly no longer the faculty of having recollections: it is the membrane which, in the most varied ways (continuity, but also discontinuity, envelopment, etc.), makes sheets of past and layers of reality correspond, the first emanating from an inside which is always already there, the second arriving from an outside always to come, the two gnawing at the present which is now only their encounter.”
15 For subjectivity of the structurally determined subject, subjectivity which is a symptomatic effect of ideology, and subjectivity which does not exist outside ideology, see Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 1971.
16 Deleuze, C1, 74.
17 Dufourmantelle, PG, 39: “Since the Greeks, the West has graduated borders, maintained separate orders, questioned limits. One proceeds by concept and not by intuition, much less by analysis of sensations”; “A floating world is troubling for the West, undoubtedly because the ineffable belongs to God alone and not to the real. Deleuze and Bergson are among the few thinkers who insist on the question of the becoming of concepts. Because European thought has had an obsession with fixity of being.”
18 Bergson, MM, 1.
19 Bergson, CE, 407.
20 Bergson, CE, 408.
21 Deleuze, C2, 173.
22 Dufourmantelle, PG, 8.
23 Dufourmantelle, PG, 6.
24 Dufourmantelle, PG, 7.
25 Dufourmantelle, PG, 68.
26 Dufourmantelle, PG, 52.
27 Dufourmantelle, PG, 88.
28 Dufourmantelle, PG, 42.
29 Dufourmantelle, PG, 55.
30 Dufourmantelle, PG, 56.
31 Dufourmantelle, PG, 56.
32 Clandestine in French [clandestin(e)] could also mean “immigrant.”
Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, pp. 142-7; 166-76. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Bailey, Colin B. Fragonard’s Progress of Love at The Frick Collection. New York: The Frick Collection in association with D. Giles Limited, London, 2011.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garland Heights, OH: Duke Classics, 2012 [1907].
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004 [1896].
Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 [1983].
Deleuze. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Geleta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [1985].
Dufourmantelle, Anne. Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living. Translated by Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018 [2013].
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1989 [1976].
Fragonard, Jean-Honoré. The Progress of Love: Love Letters. 1771-72. Oil on canvas, 124 7/8 x 85 3/8 inches. The Frick Collection, New York.
https://collections.frick.org/objects/166/the-progress-of-love-love-letters
Intermission Film. Decision to Leave. 2022. Poster, North American version.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12477480/
Park, Chan-wook, director. Decision to Leave. Distributed by CJ Entertainment, 2022. 2 hr., 19 min.
Park, Hae-young, writer. My Liberation Notes. Aired April 9-May 29, 2022. Distributed by JTBC and Netflix, 2022.
Wong, Kar-wai, director. In the Mood for Love. Distributed by Block 2 Pictures and Océan Films, 2000. 1 hr., 38 min.