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Love
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Love
LOVE (see also EXCEPTION NOT-ALL JEW CHRISTIAN)
Love in the sense Žižek understands it was first developed by Lucan in
his Seminar XX. It is thus from the beginning associated with a certain
'feminine' logic of the not-all and implies a way of thinking beyond
the master-signifier and its universality guaranteed by exception:
'Lacan's extensive discussion of love in Seminar XX is thus to be read
in the Paulinian sense, as opposed to the dialectic of the Law and its
transgression. This latter dialectic is clearly "masculine" or phallic ...
Love, on the other hand, is "feminine": it involves the paradoxes of
the not-All' (p. 335). Žižek associates love with St Paul, and it is a way
for him to think the difference between Judaism, whose libidinal
economy is still fundamentally that of the law and its trans-
gression, and Christianity, which through forgiveness and the pos-
sibility of being born again seeks to overcome this dialectic: 'It is here
that one should insist on how Lacan accomplishes the passage from
Law to Love, in short. from Judaism to Christianity" (p.345). In other
words, this love might be seen to testify - as we also find with drive
and enunciation - to a moment that precedes and makes possible the
symbolic order and its social mediation, the way in which things are
never directly what they are but only stand in for something else: 'Love
bears witness to the abyss of a self-relating gesture by means of which,
due to the lack of an independent guarantee of the social pact. the
ruler himself has to guarantee the Truth of his word" (p. 267 n. 5).
