'love'
"Oh my friends, there is no friend..."
Jacques Derrida, quoting Montaigne, quoting Aristotle...in his treatise on friendship.
"There are no equals, only rivals..."
Constantine in the BBC docudrama, 'Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire'...as he cultivated an empire of Christian love.
"For nails would not have held God-and-Man fast to the Cross, had love not held Him there..."
Saint Catherine of Siena
One supposes in life that some things are possible. Love is one of these things, no? We presume such a thing is possible? But what if love were impossible?
Our relationship with love, god (and the infinity of price and spectacle), is recently articulated in Damien Hirst’s 'For the Love of God' (2007), Platinum skull, 8,601 diamonds and human teeth,(17.1 x 12.7 x 19.1 cm).
$100 million. A record: the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist. One marvels that we can any longer, truly render Aquinas’ corporeal metaphors for spiritual things. As for love: some euphoria of the genetic Code and capitalizations as currencies of that Code? A molecular symphony of melancholy and bliss? As for God: Neurotransmissions? A battery of concepts, like 8,601 diamonds in the rough? All of which pale in comparison, perhaps, to what is wished for in the impossibility of love as the gift of some Other?
So two things: god and love. Every major religion of the world syncopates these two concepts, paradoxically, via the utilization of conceptual infinity, and one concept’s weakness becomes the other concept’s strength: the horizon of god’s love is endless, and the horizon of one’s love for god, should be too.
Yes, that is it: love is the purview of sacrifice. We must bleed for love. This is the claim of the disciple; the saint, and poet. But there are no saints any longer, and poetry is endangered, if not extinct. And the sacred, by definition, is always exterminated as a functional violence of the holy service.
Is there no love, and instead, only relations of sacrifice?
Join us in this thematic discussion and we shall see...
==============================================================
Co-moderated by Nicholas Ruiz III (US)...Daytona State College...America in Absentia (Intertheory, 2008)...Editor, Kritikos.
with special guests
Owen Ware (CA)...University of Toronto..."Love Speech" Critical Inquiry, v.34, no.3, (Spring 2008).
Edgar Landgraf (US)...Bowling Green State University...Improvisation, Art and the Art of Living (forthcoming), "Romantic Love and the Enlightenment" German Quarterly, 77/1 (Winter 2004).
Dr. Nicholas Ruiz III Associate Professor of Humanities School of Humanities and Communication Daytona State College Building 230, Room 101A Daytona Beach, FL 32120-2811 ************************************ Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org ************************************ Center for Interdisciplinary Writing and Research http://daytonastate.edu/ciwr ************************************