Guilty all the same

 "We must not make bargains with the heart, as we would with the butcher for his meat. Our business is to give what we have to give - what we can get to give. The return we have nothing to do with" - these are lines from a letter written by Samuel Bowles to Emily Dickinson (as most would like to believe) who was anguishing with unrequited love. 

Unrequited love can be unfair to the lover. This is probably because we believe that we are invested in something genuinely and so we expect to get the results - in the case of Love, "I've loved perfectly and still I don't get anything in return." Well the anger on the part of the lover here is completely justified because the concept of traditional love calls for people to be angry and sad! This is because they are told to expect certain guarantees in their relationships. To this understanding, the American cultural critic, Laura Kipnis wrote a book titled, Against Love. 

Unlike the 'toxic' males or the politically correct liberal warriors who ask men to 'take it easy' or to be 'mature' in the life instances of unrequited love (fortunately they both speak the same language here), I'd rather say anger is completely part of the process - of being in 'love' - whether you get it back or not. So what about Love? I wish to grapple with the belief of love here - the concept. Let me tell you how the larger structures come to play a part in creating 'love' and all that comes with it. This will be in regard to the murders that has been happening in our state - in the name of 'love'.

Unlike Science, the question of belief (which is often taken for granted) is strong in love. In a Guardian interview with Donna Haraway, she recounts, "We were at this conference. It was a bunch of primate field biologists, plus me and Bruno Latour. And Stephen Glickman, a really cool biologist, took us apart privately. He said: “Now, I don’t want to embarrass you. But do you believe in reality?” We were both kind of shocked by the question. First, we were shocked that it was a question of belief, which is a Protestant question. A confessional question. The idea that reality is a question of belief is a barely secularized legacy of the religious wars. In fact, reality is a matter of worlding and inhabiting. It is a matter of testing the holdingness of things. Do things hold or not?" 

Taking inspiration from this idea of belief we should ask the same question in connection to love. "Do you believe in love?" Most of the world does and they are not willing to acknowledge this 'belief' because the very acknowledgement would 'decenter' their world of emotions. Love for them is a given. But now as things stand, the individual finding himself situated in the late capitalist dome, has finally felt the weight of his 'belief' in love. He has finally discovered that the belief itself has started to show. To protect whatever is left of his beliefs, he has decided to fight back (isn't this the real 'love jihad'?). This is what in Freudian psychoanalysis, 'the return of the repressed' in a new violent form. 

To further explicate on Love and its allies, first we have to visit the most dominant forms of 'love'. Yes, I'm talking about the familial institutions, especially marriage and its concept of honesty, faithfulness and what not. Like I said, the anger with unrequited love is quite justified but is doubly justified if the lovers are legally wedded husband and wife. The lover is suffering from the same disease that the husband also suffers from. The difference is that the husband is in an arrested phase with his love while the lover is someone who desires that arrested phase. Again in response to the murders in 'the name of love', there are people in Kerala asking men to "man up" or be "mature". Well, if these people - mostly married - if they are to find their partners to be adulterers, can they leave their partners without even  a tinge of anger and regret? This is rather something to be thought of. Lets consider the word 'adultery'. The word itself stands in opposition to love as 'pure' or 'pure love' versus 'impure love'. Its pretty obvious what I'm trying to bring in here.

We can't handle the truth about our inner desires and let alone differentiate between feelings that we have towards other people. Only to this fact that Jacques Lacan has written, “Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.” Love itself is imperfect. To the contrary, we have all the literatures, movies, art cementing our inner idea of what love 'really' is. What we have to understand is that this understanding of love is not something that happened here and now. This is something that was centuries in the making. From the old Judeo-Christian values to Victorian morality and property rights - all had a huge role in cementing love (the belief) and marriage as such. To find things here in perspective, lets look into some popular love quotes. Take the famous quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson, "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all". The romantic idea of love doesn't even start there. Lets go to Rumi (some centuries back) to see what he said, "Gamble everything you love if you are a true human being". Well ain't that good news! This is what we have been fed over the centuries. My personal favorite from the lot is by 'the Sage of Concord', Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, "give all to love and leave all for love". This is my favorite because it captures the ambivalence of the feeling without the assurances of belief. If we look at the life of Emerson, he himself was a person confused with his feelings towards many women, especially Margaret Fuller.

Here adding a dialectical twist to the Emerson quote - "leaving all for love". Is it possible to leave love for love? I mean, this is the kind of question that has to surface when we run into 'chartered' territories like love. Now to return to the murders dubbed as 'love murders' by the mainstream media in Kerala - for the record, I would absolutely not call them 'love murders' because the idea of love here is a given and the coinage is not something that comes from the understanding of hidden structures but only a more 'conservative' take on love. It is only with the regressive, traditional, dominant notions that love turns 'toxic'. The romantics would love to place love as something divine and not worthy of such denigration but as I've been saying this belief in love is culturally constituted.

 The Golden Bear prize winner of the Berlin International Film Festival this year was a Romanian movie, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. In a scene, the movie defines emotion (love) by raising some questions, - "why this certainty that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are not vile acts committed as often with the hearts help as without it? Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental inquisition, the hearts reign of terror?" Here again we go back to the 'belief' in love - which exhibits its ironical position when it says that expressing anger in losing someone you love is 'immature'. Well here the director of the movie, 'Radu Jude', calls out the double standards and inverts this idea to depict the belief of love itself as 'immature'.

Here the role of specific cultural landscapes of the lover, in venting the said anger, also plays an important role. In the US and Europe, there are the 'Incel' (Involuntarily Celibate) attacks which are quite common. There often, the male holds the society responsible. His diagnosis is correct in a way (society's standards of love, expectations...) but the treatment is wrong - guy goes to a public place with a loaded machine gun and wham! Anyway it is the other side that we see here in Kerala where the male thinks he has been hoodwinked (unrequited love) and decides to not spare the 'person of interest'. Here the underlying psychology is not to let another 'alpha' male take his place and for worse to meet her and court her again in 'paradise' (that is if he decides to kill himself). The difference from the US and here is that in our case, both the diagnosis and the treatment are wrong. Ultimately, tracing the idea of love - the symptom - back to the belief itself, is the only true cure in this case.

So what is wrong here? My position in this whole matter is that most people who responded to the murders is missing the main culprit which is at the helm of the affairs here - the belief in and of Love. What I'm trying to say is far different from the fundamentalists' idea of painting love as a 'moral concern' and all. All I mean is quite the opposite - to take the concept of love from the other side by questioning its core belief systems. Regarding the murders in Kerala, it is a growing concern and when we approach this issue by saying this is not love, we should be able to say what is love! And to explain love in its traditional way will only beget the same results. So to strike at the heart of this issue means that we have to strike at our own hearts. Radically reinventing love can be the silver bullet here. One may think rooting out toxic masculinity will solve all the problems but as said before - the faith of love rooted in Judeo-Christian values is itself toxic and no interpretation will change this underlying fact. For better or worse, the belief in and of love has to change (presumably for the better). And if the people who come up with the 'immaturity' argument fails to address this (to implicate the faith of love), then the killer (lover), the society, everyone is to be blamed - 'guilty all the same'!