Why Do Fools Fall In Love by Anouchka Grose

Author:Anouchka Grose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2011-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

TILL THE SURREAL THING COMES ALONG

So is this still the state of the art where love, sex and commitment are concerned? Try before you buy and hope they weren’t putting on an act to trick you? In practice, this appears to be what people actually do, but is it the last word on the subject? In his book The Century, Alain Badiou suggests a serious alternative. In his chapter on avant-gardes he tells us, ‘The [twentieth] century has been a great century for the vision of love as a figure of truth, which is entirely different from romanticism’s fatalist and fusional conception of love.’ In other words, in the past you fell madly in love and stuck together in sickness and in health, for better or worse, etc. You went wild with desire, then grinned and bore it until you dropped dead. But in the twentieth century love became something more of an open question. It was no longer about accepting the consequences of it, but about letting it be a more volatile and open-ended state. You didn’t have to get stuck with a single notion of what love involved but could allow it to be whatever it seemed to want to be. Badiou formulates his ideas using a passage from André Breton’s surrealist text Arcanum 17, in particular the following sentence: ‘And I know that the love which at this point counts on nothing but itself does not recover and that my love for you is reborn from the ashes of the sun.’

Badiou is writing about twentieth-century art movements and the ways in which artists managed to make radical breaks with their predecessors. Rather than accepting and repeating received ideas about beauty and form, artists throughout the twentieth century put these very ideas in question in order to rethink what art could be. This sort of revolutionary art activity is discussed in the context of political revolution, raising the question of whether there’s any point in rebellions and over-turnings. Is the upset of political revolution ever really justified by the results, or is it ultimately better to knuckle down and do the best you can with what’s on offer? Breton and Badiou’s answer is that the importance of revolution isn’t in its measurable results, but in the act itself. If something has to change, then it’s not your job to make sure it changes into something perfect. You just have to change it, and the act of change will almost necessarily be exhilarating. Avant-gardes in art don’t seriously aim to ‘improve’ art in the long run—although they may aim to open things up by toppling a dominant set of ideas. The point in revolution is to access a certain kind of extremely fragile and slippery truth; to stop life becoming a series of empty gestures. The aim isn’t to solve the problem once and for all, but to create a space for something to feel somehow real, if only temporarily.

It’s possible to see how all these ideas might also

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