Do we have to re-invent love? Is love dead? Or is it gravely ill? Who is responsible for this plight of love? Maybe it is our excessive individualism that has put the last nail in the coffin of love. Maybe it is our effort to determine the market value of everything that has led to the commodification of love. We are today consuming love. It has taken away the singularity and otherness of love? Does all love look the same? Love perhaps is no longer a radical experience of the Other. It is an experience of an expected sameness. Does this have to do with another important question? Can I really be myself? Am I become tired of becoming someone? Are we all competing to become that someone? We seem to be facing the terror of the same. We can no longer be ourselves and live our life. Our becoming is brought under the regime of sameness. The other is also put under the regime of the same. This distance, therefore, between the other and the self is reduced. Everyone has to melt into the same. This may be the reason why we cannot truly love.
We cannot live our singularity nor the other can do the same. We have to become the crowd. We have lost the absolute experience of alterity. We have lost our faces and become defaced. We have the challenge to die to the sameness of the self ( narcissistic gratification) and love once again. This means we have to accept ourselves and other situated beyond achievement and performance. But unfortunately coming under the regime of sameness has led us to squander negativity of the other. There is no longer hell. Jean-Paul Satre’s other is dead. We are living in a world of the same. There is no longer the mystery of the other. We are burning in the inferno of the same. Everyone is living in the hell of the same. Satre’s other as hell is dead. We are all burning in the hell of the same. All otherness has come to die into ethno-sameness. Our society has become a society of hate. Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society is dead. Our narcissistic self entrepreneuring society loves to hate.
It takes two love. But the two cannot be other of the same. Sameness cannot be the benchmark to render otherness as different. If that is the case, then the other becomes the other in as much the other is different from the sameness. This contrasting of sameness with the other reduced to difference is erasing the otherness of the other. Love is a relationship between two Others who can truly be themselves and do not have to become contrasting/opposite images of each other. Such rendering of the other erases the future. The future is to occur on the expectant lines. There is no other future to come. It is the same known and expected future that will come. When this same known, expected future does not come then love turns into hate. Love thus becomes an exchangeable commodity. When we cannot consume love, we begin to consume hate. We have indeed reached a depressing state of exhausted individualism.
Our narcissistic individualism is tired and exhausted. We are already living in a burnout society. How do we turn our clock back? How are we to love again? We have to come back full circle. The self has to once again die in the other. The self has the challenge to vanish in the other. We have to embrace amorous oblativity . Only then we shall return to the two of love and love again. It will bring the singular ‘ we two’ as not belonging to one or the other but would exist for both and for all. It is only by vanishing of the self in the other that we can respond to the vanishing of the other in the sameness of the self. Only then we maybe able to stop consuming love. We have to save the drained, tired and exhausted narcissistic entrepreneur of the self. We have reached a limit or breaking point. Only true love can save us. This love is free. But it involves dying to oneself. The ability to love is linked to the ability to die. Society of hate exhibits nacro-politics. It advances our ability to kill while love enhances our ability to die. It is this ability to die that gives us the ability to live as well as enables us to love. True love loses oneself in and for the other and finds oneself and the other. True love lets us be ourselves as well as lets the other be the other.
