Perfect Doesn’t Exist: How Anxiety Equates to Love

“It’s not like the love that they showed us on T.V. It’s a home that can burn, It’s a limb to freeze. It’s worry. Love is worry.”

-Jeff Rosenstock, While You’re Alive (2016)

If we weren’t self-conscious of ourselves, the feeling behind love would only be an elaborate plan constructed by our bodies to reproduce and continue our human civilization. We wouldn’t care about the people in the relationship, only the result of sexual relief and a continuing bloodline through a child. Thankfully, we are self-aware of our existence to where we have the fantastic opportunity to experience suffering through love in all its horrific glory and worry.

As a critical object, love, as Madonna puts it, makes the world go round. Love is what motivates us to be productive. Love is “the feeling that you are completely alone, but not abandoned....Revolution is love” (Horvat 6).[1] Although love can be associated with politics, what is meant by “revolution is love” is more the emotion behind it. While in love, we are aware that we’re in love since we act in a somewhat different way. This is known not only through the human experience of others, but also through the understanding of human biology. In biology, love is determined by “sex drive, attachment, and partner preference”[2], which are caused by five neurochemicals: “testosterone, estrogen, dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin.”[3] Through this understanding of love in a purely objective level, it will be easier to make connections as to why we love love. However, there is difficulty when forming a knowing of love since we actively try to escape its true meaning.

Humans tend to not understand the desire for the hurt love gives us, opting instead for a “‘zero risks [type of] love” (Badiou 8)[4]. People are under the false pretense that true love is supposed to be this magical phenomenon that takes away any pain from the person who experiences it; an entry to an eternally hedonistic lifestyle. However, as French philosopher Georges Bataille theorizes, “There is in fact no human pleasure without some irregularity in its circumstances, without the breaking of an interdiction” (Bataille 25)[5]. In other words, the reason why we get pleasure when we’re “in love” is because there’s a possibility that it may not last forever. It might eventually die. This possibility heightens the stakes of a loving relationship since it evokes fear in humans, so when the outcome of the relationship is positive, the hormones in our bodies react in way to where we experience great love euphoria. Knowing that, the whole idea of a zero risks love is false since there’s always a risk of a negative outcome. In order to fully understand love, “risk and adventure must be re-invented against safety and comfort” (Badiou 11).

As a philosophical process, love is worry. This is why Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard thinks marriage is the ultimate test of love, since “the absolute value of commitment is endorsed by marriage” (Badiou 14)[6]. In our society, we put marriage in high standing since it’s complete understanding between two lovers. Although marriage is admired since people respect the responsibility of loving someone “till death do us part,” the adoration of marriage should be on the expected anxiety that comes from it. Couples have to worry about their partner cheating, getting bored, changing (physically or mentally), and a whole range of scenarios including the death of the other.

Although we know love is worry, we need to understand why love is worry. Jacques Lacan’s philosophy is that there is no sexual relationship, that “in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own...the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure” (Badiou 18). Although it seems as though Lacan is making a case for the idea of a sexual relationship, he is doing the opposite. He is saying that when two people are fucking, they are projecting themselves onto each other; they are theoretically fucking themselves, and depending on how they value themselves, there is a fierce presence of love. Imagine a scenario where a man was having sex and his mindset was to fuck the other in such a pleasurable way that they come. The man is thinking of all the possibilities he can have sex with this person in order to have the best case scenario for both parties. Although this is already a nice gesture, the love comes from the metaphysical. The man is anxious when fucking, since he’s worried that he might be bad, and because his partner is a reflection of himself, that means they will not have the best time. This is why Lacan thinks there is no sexual relationship, because even when having sex, the love, the worry, the anxiety is the driving force behind the fucking.

Thus, although Lacan’s philosophy may come across as narcissistic, that may actually make the love stronger. As Badiou addresses, “desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist manner...love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life thus disrupted and re-fashioned” (Badiou 21). Although Badiou is separating desire and love, that isn’t entirely fair. From a Hegelian[7] standpoint, desire is the recognition of others, the acknowledgement that someone has done good in the world. Although it’s understandable as to why Badiou isolates the two, with desire focusing on the objectivity of the person while love focuses on the subjectivity, desire does become subjective due to its correlation to love and the subject wanting to understand the good they have done. There is pressure when someone wants to be recognized for their achievements, because if they don’t get that recognition, they develop negative thoughts that they are being misrecognized. These negative thoughts happen due to the anxiety and worry of the situation, where the person is thinking about what they could have done in that scenario better. To make a connection to the above quote from Badiou, if someone is misrecognized or not acknowledging someone’s love, they will attempt to re-fashion it so a better probability can come out of it next time. If someone takes the time to reevaluate their choices for the sake of others, suffering from anxiety, worrying, that is love.

However, in relation to another intellectual, Gilles Deleuze[8], Badiou’s point of view is also supported when correlating it to Deleuze’s theory on nihilism[9]. In Deleuze’s theory, he paints nihilism in three ways: negative, reactive, and passive. The negative view is the “life is meaningless” version of nihilism, where not only does one think that life isn’t worth caring about, but that it’s not good; it’s a horrible existence. The reactive view is the enjoyment of seeing life as naked, while knowing that there isn’t a reason to care about it; an open playground of sorts. The final one, passive, is knowing that life is just a road to an end, but also appreciating it without caring about or indulging in it, focusing on the meta-selfishness of wanting others to be happy. Whereas Badiou’s view of desire correlates to reactionary nihilism, his view on love relates to passive nihilism. To Badiou, desire is an example of reactionary nihilism since someone who primarily focuses on desire only cares about the self in one level of understanding: the “I”. This nihilistic point of view is only concerned on self-efficiency and is a selfishness that doesn’t include others. In contrast, love is an example of passive nihilism since there are at least two levels of understanding: the “I” and the “you”. Although the person who is loving knows that it doesn’t mean much in the end, they still care about the happiness of others and are considerate as to how they approach them. From their consideration, they try not to inconvenience the other, and from this carefulness to not hurt others is where worry comes in, where the person is thinking about the repercussions that might happen if the situation doesn’t go the best it can.

The tenderness that originates from the unease of worry is what Badiou was trying to suggest in certain sections of In Praise of Love. Badiou understood the selfishness that encapsulates love, but only focused on how it benefited the self rather than thinking about other, more fear-driven factors on why the self would go out of their way to love. Although Badiou’s state of mind in In Praise of Love possesses logic, a look at what causes panic in the human mind fills in gaps he missed, in which the conclusion is that worry is a subset of love.

References

[1] Srecko Horvat, “Foreplay: To Fall in Love or Revolution”, The Radicality of Love (1-23).

[2] Fisher HE, Aron A, Brown LL, "Romantic love: a mammalian brain system for mate choice" (2173-86).

[3] S. Zeki, “The neurobiology of love”, FEBS Lett (2007) Volume 581 (2575-2579).

[4] Alain Badiou, “Love Under Threat”, from In Praise of Love (5-11).

[5] Georges Bataille, “Pleasure and the Sadness of Death”, from Hegel, Death and Sacrifice (22-23).

[6] Alain Badiou, “Philosophers and Love”, from In Praise of Love (12-26).

[7] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 16th century German philosopher

[8] 20th century French philosopher, focusing on the metaphysical

[9] Gilles Deleuze, “The Overman: Against the Dialectic,” Nietzsche and Philosophy (147-194).