I remember one night, as I lay next to my girlfriend of the time who was already asleep, that the thought of something bad happening to her came to me suddenly. I remember that it gave me utter dread. It was the first time I had experienced that regarding someone who wasn’t an immediate member of my family. I thought that it was this that more than anything told me I was “in love.” It had never been the heat of any moment, nor even the happy little afternoons we’d share eating in the late golden California sun. It appeared as just the dark epiphany, a hypothetical, a what if that touched upon an impasse.
I was always afraid of this word. It means never what it purports to mean. And yet because it is a word with which we seem to be happy to communicate to the other that he or she or they are important for us, that we are happy they are there or should be there to satisfy and console us, it works somewhat like a tool. It is bandied about. It is linguistically material. I love X. I and X go hand in hand. We are a product! And yet, for all its pervasive appearance in our culture, it’s a word that’s betrayed and abused and phantasmatic. It’s a word which, for all its (mis)use, has not become clearer. I still do not know what it signifies.
And so when the great Dr. Cornel West tells us “love” should be the basis for a new political imaginary, especially during these hard times, I don’t know what he means. What does it mean to love a brother? Is all of humanity my brothers and sisters? Must I accept, as Dr. West clearly does, that for this Family of Love to be true there needs to be something a little bit beyond the womb and the tomb, as he likes to say? A heaven of souls, perhaps? What does it mean to love he whom one doesn’t know? Or, even better, to love he whom one knows is bad? Is a love not felt at the core of self, an abstract maybe even rhetorical love, legitimate?
If I were a pedagogic philosopher–and I am neither pedagogic nor a philosopher but simply a mouth (I like to think of myself as those lips and teeth in Samuel Beckett’s “Not I“: a mouth that has to speak because it is both a pleasure for it and the only thing it’s good at. That is my barren imaginary: shadows and a set of lips teeth tongue)–if I were a pedagogic philosopher, I would list here what so-and-so said about love and begin to find a strand of truth running down through time and event. But the task seems tedious. As Lacan said in his Seminar XX, “[L]ove . . . People have been talking about nothing else for a long time. Need I emphasize the fact that it is at the very heart of philosophical discourse?”1 (Philosophy is, after all, the love of wisdom!) Even psychoanalysis reels back in light of the distortions and miasmas we exhale around the unacceptable fact that is the inexistence of the sexual relationship: love, for psychoanalysis, is the near-ideological, wishful mental scaffolding that there is a someone out there perfect for me, that true “happiness” (Lacan would say the phallus, but let’s talk about that later) is out there ready to fill my hole (of being). The history of love is the history of disappointment.2
Instead, like Roland Barthes, I am happy to stay at the level of discourse, A Lover’s Discourse: at the level of love as it manifests itself in verbal, emotional, and physical ejaculations, or as Barthes calls them, “figures”.3 At the level of the sarcasm between a lover and his jealous partner. At the level of the sighs of a grieving widow. Of a college boy at night feeling dread in silence at the idea of his other’s suffering.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat,” a story in which Delia, a Black woman, is abused by her husband until he gets his just deserts, Hurston writes, “[Delia] had brought love to the union and he had brought a longing after the flesh.”4 It’s a marvelous piece that, if anything, demonstrates in a marked way what Lacan saw as the problematic between love and sex: “love makes up for the lack of a sexual relationship” (Quoted in Badiou and Cassin, 2017). Is not sex an avenue of love? Is it not through sex and desire that we continue to show love to the beloved (until, I suppose, we all arrive at those dignified ages when, for one reason or another, we simply agree to not do the hanky panky any more)? And yet, why is it that sex becomes precisely what Hurston writes is not love, what is opposed to love in Delia’s case? How does sex morph from the romantic liaison between love-birds into a brutal act? Indeed, sex is transgressive, in both good and bad ways.
This impasse is the reason why, even before reading Lacan and discovering that we could use math to illustrate our ideas, I have been teaching Hurston’s story as revealing the fact that the word “love” operates in our discourse as 
The truth of the lover is that she can only be in her pain, in her anxiety, in her laughter, in the efflorescence of her melancholy while the imaginary scaffolding she has built to sustain what psychoanalysis tells us is pure disturbance–namely, sexuality–strains to keep itself together.
Notes
1 Quoted in Badiou, Lacan, Columbia University Press, p. 65
2 In Seminar I, Lacan said something very interesting: “The structure of this artificial phenomenon which is transference and that of the spontaneous phenomenon we call love, and more specifically passionate love, are, on the plane of the psychic, equivalent” (Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan; Bk 1, Norton, 1991, p.90).
3 “These fragments of discourse can be called figures. The word is to be understood, not in its rhetorical sense, but rather in its gymnastic or choreographic acceptation . . . . So it is with the lover at grips with his figures: he struggles in a kind of lunatic sport, he spends himself, like an athlete; he ‘phrases,’ like an orator; he is caught, stuffed into a role, like a statue. The figure is the lover at work” (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, Hill and Wang, 2010, p. 4)
4 Hurston, The Complete Stories, HarperCollins, 2008, p. 75
5 Lacan, Écrits, tr. by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006, p. 694
6 “The psychotic lives in the terror of breakdown,” writes Barthes, even though the breakdown has already occurred. “Similarly, it seems, for the lover’s anxiety: it is the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I was first ‘ravished.’ Someone would have to be able to tell me: ‘Don’t be anxious any more–you’ve already lost him/her’” (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, Hill and Wang, 2010, p. 30)
Ruminations 
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