When we love, our bodies and minds spin. Sometimes, as in a gentle dance. Sometimes, it becomes a vortex: we fall in love, vertiginously. (The image of Scottie in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo comes to mind.) We lose orientation, and we do not know who we are anymore. Usual habits are under threat. The meanings of the norms regulating life in common begin to blur.
For some people, love may be exciting, reinvigorating, even hopeful. For others, love is frightening. In the Western tradition, philosophy usually takes the side of the fearful. Philosophers tend to define love, in Fannie Bialek’s words, “from secure, rational foundations or toward security” (p. 37). To recall the memorable metaphor that opens Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, a philosopher’s favorite game is trying to catch children’s spinning tops. Bialek is skeptical: a form of understanding aimed at pinning down identical and eternal essences, or at least clear-cut definitions, and at providing reassuring and soothing answers, would actually misunderstand the phenomenon. And it would “ruin a child’s game” (p. 34).
Bialek’s book embarks on another path, depicting love as a sui generis form of knowledge, one moved not by a desire to find remedies to human vulnerability, transience, and contingency, but rather by the radical acceptance that erotic desires emerge precisely from and dwell in vulnerability, transience, and contingency.
Erotic knowledge differs from the aspirational project of Socrates and Diotima in Plato’s Symposium that looks for ideas that transcend bodily, particular, and accidental experiences. Further, erotic knowledge is different from the consumeristic logic exhibited by another Platonic character, Lysias, who is anxious to determine the value of the love object in order to gain control, minimize risks, and avoid regret. This is the logic of “markets” (p. 11), Bialek notes rightly – the one that, I believe, has become largely hegemonic today, as appears evident when we look at the sexual and romantic behaviors encouraged and reproduced by dating apps or by the bourgeoning AI industry of intimacy.
When we take on proper erotic knowledge, on the contrary, we seek to disclose, illuminate, and interpret a singularity: my one beloved, for example, or the particular relationship that binds us. (Or something else, for instance a work of art that has a special meaning for us.) When we are in love, we ardently desire to grasp a lot about our beloved: what they feel, think, and wish; where they are from and where they are going; and how their various facets, motions, memories, signs mean. Our attempts to get to know them bring us to surprising discoveries about ourselves. Erotic knowledge is always also self-knowledge. But we know (or should know) that our will to know is constitutively curbed by what we can never apprehend: how things will turn out, what will happen to us. Such ignorance is upsetting and yet desirable, vibrant with mysteries, a mixture of uncanny familiarity and delightful newness.
In love, we are animated by what Daniela Dover has called an “erotic curiosity”, a desire to inquire indefinitely. This resembles Plato’s law of (erotic) desire in The Symposium, further articulated by G.W.F. Hegel and Jacques Lacan: “desire is necessarily desire for something which is lacking”. Negativity is what moves the spin.
Precisely insofar as it argues against a certain modality of doing philosophy, Bialek’s work is exquisitely philosophical. It gestures towards philosophical knowledge that blends with lovers’ epistemic and practical powers. It takes seriously the pain of vertigo, the anxieties to which “traditional” philosophy attends, but Bialek offers a different method. Not all philosophers run “after understanding,” Carson tells us. We might desire philosophy in order to furnish ourselves “with pretexts for running after tops.”
Importantly, Bialek’s philosophical proposal does not suggest we should give up reasons and reasoning altogether. Chapter 2, in particular, makes us aware of the fact that philosophical knowledge – the urge to give an account of love – is needed especially when we are confronted by troubles tarnishing our erotic experiences. We desperately need reasons when we feel our love is somehow “wrong” (p. 59), when we find ourselves loving someone or something that is harmful for us or for other people we love. Love is not rationally warranted from the ground up (p. 67-69), as Harry Frankfurt has argued: we cannot give reasons to completely explain why we have fallen in and continue to love. Yet, the erotic experience does not foster sheer irrationality; it situates us in a worldly space of reasons. We do owe justifications and explanations to the people emotionally entangled with us.
By conceptually reflecting on our sentimental lives, we might end up bringing to the fore and mobilizing other erotic desires. What is more, I would claim, and Bialek seems to agree, our criteria for the wrongness of love are often embedded in given social rules, values, norms, and institutions. Thinking about love does and should amount to a critical reflection with regard to the society we inhabit, and that shapes our emotional endeavors. Erotic knowledge might, if need be, take the shape of a denunciation of and rebellion against identities, habits, and structures that are felt and deemed oppressive and unjust.
While in the Western philosophical tradition numerous attempts have been made to understand the nature of love, romantic or otherwise, and to grapple with its many related ethical and political problems, there have been few attempts to come to terms with the end of love. Contrary to an established and powerful ideology, Love in Time makes a case for the importance of our passing erotic adventures and bonds.
Love is in time. Notice that this expression is imbued with a brilliant semantic multiplicity. To begin with, questions around becoming and change are inherent to what love is and why it matters to us. Love is not a static affective state but a process, a story. Lovers’ needs, wishes, beliefs, aspirations, interests, and bodies do not stay the same. We harm our beloved when we are “inattentive to the passage of time, or in denial of it,” when we “wish to stunt their growth, keep their faces from aging, and limit the expansions of their mind” (p. 2). When we love, we desire to witness (and maybe even contribute to) the other’s mutations, to be solicited and changed by them.
“Love is in time” alludes, moreover, to the timing of two (or more) people coming together to experience and share in erotic bliss. “Timing” implies an element of luck, of arbitrariness, a degree of spontaneity: we have fallen in love with each other, it has just happened. We have not sought a partner endowed with certain characteristics and qualities in order to satisfy a list of expectations and needs. My hopes cannot be completely established in advance. They are, at least partially, the result of the influence of the other, of what we do, and of the time we spend together – or apart.
“Love is in time” means, finally, that there is a time for love, and a time, maybe, for falling out of love, or for its aftermath. According to Bialek, love “ends when we no longer desire a future together” (p. 33). Does such desire cease for fear of getting hurt, especially when the future appears as dark and full of doubts, obstacles, and pain, or are there other reasons? Sometimes, individual lovers transform themselves but are not able to change the rituals and patterns that account for their collective narration, way of living, infrastructure. Sometimes, a relationship structure or dynamic changes in ways that do not fulfill its participants’ wishes anymore. An explanation for the end of love might be thus identified as a mismatch between individuals’ and relationships’ trajectories: We have become someone else that our bond cannot accommodate or represent anymore – or our bond has become something we cannot and do not want to recognize and endorse. (Bialek hints at something of the sort in her discussion of the vicissitudes of Prior and Louis in Angels in America). At other times, there might be social and political circumstances – work-related pressures and difficulties, necessities of migration, separation imposed by wars – that drain lovers’ energies and forward-looking attitudes. Imagination and the creation of futures are not only individual, subjective processes, they are materially, economically, and politically embedded and shaped.
Since Love in Time is not in the business of giving reasons that fully account for the beginning and unfolding of an erotic bond, it cannot completely account for love’s unraveling. The erotic type of knowledge it articulates and fosters, however, can be helpful not only when we are happily enamored, but also when we are facing a potential or actual loss. This is practical knowledge, a sort of know-how, that gives us the strength to learn how to stay in the uncertainty and troubles. Erotic knowledge invites us to be tolerant and understanding when faced with others’ failures (of care, of imagination), and our own, and it invites us to accept and welcome our shortcomings as lovers and as human beings – not to excuse immoral deeds, but to explore and learn from them.
