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Title: Obsessive Love Author: Hakim Bey Language: en Topics: love Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://hermetic.com/bey/obsessive-love
“Rough dialectics” allows us to indulge an impure taste for history — a
dredging operation — bricolage of “suppressed & realized” bricabrac —
foolish unsavory outdated practises such as “obsessive love”. Romance is
“Roman” only in a terminal sense, in that it was brought back to “Rum”
(the Islamic name for Europe & Byzantium) by Crusaders & troubadours.
Crazed hopeless passion (’ishq) appears first in texts from the Orient
such as Ibn Hazm’s Ring of the Dove (actually a slang term for for the
neck of circumcised cock) & in the early Layla & Majnun material from
Arabistan. The language of this literature was appropriated by the sufis
(’Attar, Ibn ’Arabi, Rumi, Hafez, etc.) thus further eroticizing an
already eroticized culture and religion.
But if desire pervades the structure and style of Islam, nevertheless it
remains a repressed desire. “He who loves but remains chaste and died of
longing, achieves the status of a martyr in the Jihad”,i.e., paradise —
or so claims a popular but perhaps spurious tradition of the Prophet
himself. The cracking tension of this paradox galvanizes a new category
of emotion into life: romantic love, based on the unsatisfied desire, on
“separation” rather than “union”… that is, on longing. The Hellenistic
period (as evoked for instance by Cavafy) supplied the genres for this
convention — the “romance” itself as well as the idyll and the erotic
lyric — but Islam set new fire to the old forms with its system of
passional sublimation. The Greco-Egypto-Islamic ferment adds a
pederastic element to the new style; moreover, the ideal woman of
romance is neither wife nor concubine but someone in the forbidden
category, certainly someone outside the category of mere reproduction.
Romance appears therefor as a kind of gnosis, in which spirits and flesh
occupy antithetical positions; also perhaps as a kind of advanced
libertinage in which strong emotion is seen as more satisfactory than
satisfaction itself. Viewed as “spiritual alchemy” the goal of the
project would appear to involve the inculcation of non-ordinary
consciousness. This development reached extreme but still “lawfull”
degrees with such sufis as Ahmad Ghazzali, Awhadoddin Kermani and
Abdol-Rhaman Jami, who “witnessed” the presence of the Divine Beloved in
certain beautiful boys and yet remained (reputedly) chaste. The
Troubadours said the same of their lady-loves; Dante’s Vita Nuova
represents the extreme example. Christians and Moslems alike walked a
very treacherous precipice with this doctrine of sublime chastity, but
the spiritual effects could sometimes prove tremendous, as with
Fakhroddin ’Iraqi, or indeed Rumi and Dante themselves. But wasn’t it
possible to view the question of desire from a “tantrik” perspective and
admit that “union” is also a form of supreme enlightenment? Such a
position was taken by Ibn ’Arabi, but he insisted on legal marriage or
concubinage. And since all homosexuality is forbidden in Islamic Law, a
boy-loving sufi had no “safe” category for sensual realization. The
jurist Ibn Taimiyya once demanded of such a dervish whether he had done
more than simply kiss his beloved.”And what if I did?” replied the
rogue. The answer would be “guilty of heresy!” of course, not to mention
even lower forms of crime. A similar answer would be given to any
Troubadour with “tantrik” (adulterous) tendencies — and perhaps this
answer drove some of them into the organized heresy of Catharism.
Romantic love in the west received energies from neoplatonism, just as
the islamic world; and romance provided an acceptable (still
orthodox)means of compromise between Christian morality and the
rediscovered erotocosm of Antiquity. Even so the balancing-act was
precarious: — Pico della Mirandola and the pagan Botticelli ended up in
the arms of Savonarola. A secretive minority of Renaissance nobles,
churchmen and artists opted out altogether in favor of clandestin
paganism; the Hypnerotomachia of Poliphilo, or the garden Monsters at
Bomarzo, bear witness to the existence of this “tantrik” sect. But for
most platonizers, the idea of alove based on longing alone served
orthodox and allegorical ends, in which the material beloved can only be
a distant shadow of the real (as exemplified by such as St. Theresa and
St.John of the Cross) and can only be loved according to a “chivalrous”,
chaste and penitential code. The whole point of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur
is that Lancelot fails to achieve the chivalric ideal by loving
Guinevere in the flesh rather than only in the spirit.
The emergence of Capitalism exercises a strange effect on romance. I can
only express it with an absurd fantasy: — it’s as if the Beloved becomes
the perfect commodity, always desired, always paid for, but never really
enjoyed. The self-denial of Romance harmonizes neatly with the
self-denial of Capitalism. Capital demands scarcity, both of production
and of erotic pleasure, rather than limit its requirements simply to
morality or chastity. Religion forbids sexuality, thus investing denial
with glamor; capital withdraws sexuality, infusing it with despair.
“Romance” now leads to the Wertherian suicide, Byron’s disgust, the
chastity of the dandies. In this sense, romance will become the perfect
two-dimensional obsession of the popular song and the advertisement,
serving the utopian trace within the infinite reproduction of the
commodity.
In response to this situation, modern times have offered two judgements
of romance, apparently opposed, which relate to our present hermeneutic.
One, the surrealist amour fou, clearly belongs to the romantic
tradition, but proposes a radical solution to the paradox of desire by
combining the idea of sublimation with the tantrik perspective.In
opposing the scarcity (or “emotional plague”as Reich called it) of
Capitalism, Surrealism proposes a transgressive excess of the most
obsessive desire and the most sensual realization. What the romance of
Nezami or Malory had separated (“longing” and “union”), the Surrealists
proposed to recombine. The effect was meant to be explosive, literally
revolutionary.
The second point of view relevant here was also revolutionary, but
“classical” rather than “romantic”. The anarchist-individualist John
Henry Mackay despaired of romantic love, which he could only see as
tainted with the social forms of ownership and alienation. The romantic
lover longs to “possess” or to be possessed by the beloved. If marriage
is simply legal prostitution (the usual anarchist analysis), Mackay
found that “love” itself had become a commodity-form. Romantic love is a
sickness of the ego and its relation to “property”; in opposition Mackay
proposed erotic friendship, free of property relations, based on
generosity rather than longing and withdrawal (i.e.,scarcity): — a love
between equal self-rulers.
Although Mackay and the Surrealists seem opposed, there does exist a
point at which they meet: the sovereignty of love. Moreover both reject
the platonic heritage of “hopeless longing”, which is now seen as merely
self-destructive — perhaps a measure of the debt owed by both the
anarchists and the surrealists to Nietzsche. Mackay demands an
apollonian eros, the surrealists of course opt for Dionysos, obsessive,
dangerous. But both are in revolt against “romance”
Nowadays both these solutions to the problem of romance seem still
“open” , still “possible”. The atmosphere may feel yet more polluted
with degraded images of desire than in the days of Mackay or Breton, but
there appear to have been no qualitative changes in the relations
between love and Too-Late Capitalism since then. I admit to a
philosophical preference for Mackay’s position because I have been
unable to sublimate desire in a context of “hopeless obsession” without
falling into misery; whereas happiness (Mackay’s goal) seems to arise
from “giving-up” of all false chivalry and self-denying dandyism in
favor of more “pagan” and convivial modes of loves. Still, it must be
admitted that both “separation” and “union” are non-ordinary states of
consciousness. Intense obsessive longing constitutes a “mystical state”,
which only needs trace of religion to crystallize as full-blown
neoplatonic ecstasy. But we romantics should recall that happiness also
possesses an element completely unrelated to any tepid bourgeois
coziness or vapid cowardice. Happiness expresses a festal and even an
insurrectionary aspect which gives it — paradoxically — its own romantic
aura.Perhaps we can imagine a synthesis of Mackay and Breton — surely an
umbrella and sewing-machine on an operating-table”: — and construct a
utopia based on generosity as well as obsession. (Once again the
temptation arises to attempt a conflation of Nietzsche with Charles
Fourier and his “Passional Attraction”…); but in fact , I have dreamed
this (I remember it suddenly, as if it were literally a dream) — and it
has taken on a tantalizing reality and filtered into my life — in
certain Temporary Autonomous Zones — an “impossible” time and space
….and on this brief hint, all my theory is based.