Love’s Language

In one of the most moving scenes in the hit television series Heated Rivalry, Shane and Ilya talk on the phone after the funeral of Ilya’s father. English frustrates Ilya; it’s forcing all his thoughts to be cannibalized in translation. He’s about to give up trying when Shane offers just to listen, in whatever language. Not to understand, but to hear him, to let the words into his body. As Ilya vents in Russian, Ilya says “I love you” to Shane for the first time. Shane does not understand this—to him the words mean nothing at all, yet the words nonetheless reach him. The sound waves enter his body; love leaves a trace in Shane’s embodied life even if he cannot yet access the words in his psyche. Here, we have an amazing moment where language doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, and yet it also is not doing nothing. Is that not what happens anytime we tell someone we love them? The phrase itself is empty on its own, and yet this emptiness becomes the container through which we transmit our most intimate lives. 

In Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Roland Barthes writes: “I-love-you has no usages. Like a child’s word, it enters into no social constraint; it can be a sublime, solemn, trivial word, it can be an erotic, pornographic word. It is a socially irresponsible word.” The English translation is misleading because it adds a moral judgment in the use of the word “irresponsible,” when the word Barthes uses, “baladeur,” should be translated more like “wandering,” in the sense of something being done without a precise aim. The translation leads us to an easy reading of Heated Rivalry: that it is a “socially irresponsible” love between two people drawn together by the very impossibility of their relationship. This is not a bad reading, but we might think of love as always impossible and yet somehow realized at the most improbable moment. Ilya and Shane must learn not to judge their desire, to see it as “irresponsible,” and instead respect the beauty of how something totally accidental changes the very paradigm of their lives. In Heated Rivalry, we see how a yielding to bodily desire transforms into an ability to finally say “I-love-you” and have it work. That love in this scene enters Shane’s body without judgment or shame shows us how love’s irreverence (a better choice than irresponsibility) is what allows us to actually experience something called love.

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Psychoanalysis is worth defending because it teaches us that negativity is not nothing. Lacan, in Seminar XX, describes love as when the sexual relation “stops not being written.” A double negative produces a positive. In Lacan’s thought, a contingency gives us the impression that we’ve found it—that other half—but the total realization of wish-fulfillment cannot last. Once you think you’ve realized your deepest fantasy through love, love begins to unravel itself. A double negative slips into a single negative; “stops not being written” becomes “doesn’t stop being written, doesn’t stop, won’t stop” until love itself becomes exhausting (and, ultimately, exhausted).

Importantly for psychoanalysis, fantasies do not just exist in our heads; instead, they extend into our material lives. Think of that beautiful scene, early on in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, when Elio furiously writes in his notebook before being called downstairs. The camera lingers on the notebook rustling in the breeze, allowing us to see Elio’s frustration, confusion, and the intensity of his emotion. The experience of love begs to be written, whether in the literal form of writing or in art, photography, or any other form of expression. Love’s intensity compels us to produce some trace of that feeling in the material world. Love, in this sense, is like beauty—as when Elaine Scarry invokes Wittgenstein in the opening of On Beauty: “Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.” Elio scratches his feelings into his notebook, not because it will help him process his feelings, but because he needs to make them real. 

Material life, too, doesn’t have the weight it should when it comes to love. Think of that scene after Elio and Oliver consummate their affair and Elio joins Oliver on a trip into town. Even having sex isn’t enough to prove to Elio that he’s wanted. Instead, he asks “Are you happy I came?”—a question loaded with the feeling that all of this is too good to be true. And what is true, now, in the face of love? Barthes again: “Always the same reversal: what the world takes for ‘objective,’ I regard as factitious; and what the world regards as madness, illusion, error, I take for truth.” Barthes could have used many words instead of “factice,” which generally means “artificial;” yet this particular word hearkens to Jean-Paul Sartre and his notion of “facticité:” that which we take to be true, but which is actually a contingency we must overcome to arrive at freedom. Love exposes the so-called “truth” of the world to be a fabrication and asks us to imagine what freedom might look like. No wonder philosophers like Alain Badiou and Mari Ruti champion love so fiercely in their work. Love unsettles truth so we might experience something called freedom.

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The story goes something like this: I’m on the train to Boston and thinking about my ex, and you text me. Your timing was always uncanny, like at the moment I was ready to cede myself to a life I knew would make me miserable, there you were. We hadn’t talked for a while. I wasn’t doing a very good job of just being friends who have sex. Then you broke up with your partner, and it was better to keep my distance. After a couple months, you text me again, and suddenly I’m at an open mic listening to you perform. It was the first time I heard you sing and I wanted nothing more than to kiss you, but I didn’t. We were just friends, after all. I get home, thinking I did a good job playing it cool, and two days later, we’re at a concert together and you put your arm around me. I can’t resist anymore, and while it wasn’t the first time we kissed, it felt like I was experiencing something universal, something holy. Isn’t that what love is: a contingent we turn into a universal? Isn’t that why so many people are stuck longing for the love they had when they were young, before they decided to be “practical” and settle for someone they liked but didn’t love? Because despite the objective reality that that person was just one out of many and that what they experienced was probably not even real, but a fantasy, that doesn’t stop their attachment because love isn’t just when fantasy is realized; it’s when fantasy becomes real. 

Real in the Lacanian sense, where we finally find it, that unnamable thing we’ve been searching for all our lives, and can touch it, kiss it, make it ours. When impossibility produces something we call being human, love is when the sexual relation “stops not being written.” And of course, as Lacan tells us when he’s developing his concept of “objet a,” coming so close to the object-cause of our desire causes anxiety because we realize if we find it, we’ll stop desiring. Love, however, produces a different kind of anxiety. Not fear that we’ll never desire again, but fear that we’ll never get this much enjoyment; that we get used to something too good to be true, or, at least, too good to last. 

Or maybe I think that way because, psychoanalytically, I’m a woman, and so I’m always suspicious of whether I’m actually good enough to satisfy the other’s desire, or if I’m just leading them astray. In her essay, “Love Anxieties,” Renata Salecl puts this beautifully: “A woman is concerned that she does not possess the object that a man sees in her, and thus she constantly wonders what is in her more than herself; because of this uncertainty, she endlessly questions the Other’s desire.” Isn’t that the cause of Elio’s inner turmoil in Call Me By Your Name? Remember when he joins Oliver on a trip to town and asks “Are you glad I came?” The two have already consummated the relationship, but Elio can’t help but be suspicious. Is Oliver feeling the same wellspring of emotion that’s coursing through Elio? Does Oliver still want Elio, or has he gotten his enjoyment and is now ready to move on?

I spent four months going back and forth with this same question, as you told me that you didn’t want a relationship but got closer and closer to me. Remember what you said, when I finally tried to tell you I loved you? Of course, I didn’t say those words. Like Ilya and Shane, I told you my feelings indirectly. I said: “I’m beginning to get feelings and I don’t want to get hurt.” What I really meant was “Every day I feel like I’ve already lost you.” And you said that, while on normal days you were just going through the motions, when you were with me you were “on.” There was something alive in you again when we spent all those hours together. That wasn’t love? 

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In Wong Kar-wai’s film Happy Together, Chang gives Yiu-Fai a tape recorder and asks him to leave a message. What can he say? “I love you” doesn’t make sense: the two have never broken the sexual tension of their friendship. “You changed my life” would come as a surprise: Chang didn’t do anything but play football, work at a restaurant, and get an occasional drink. He can’t even say “I want you to stay” because that wouldn’t be true; he wants to go, and, secretly, wishes they could go together. What do you say to someone who broke you out of the repetitive spell you let dictate your life? When for years you’ve been stuck coming back to the same relationship because it feels just good enough to want more and yet hurts too much to last. For Chang, he and Yiu-Fai got off to a bad start and managed to become friends, maybe more than friends. For Yiu-Fai, befriending Chang was like being awoken to life again (in the film, Wong Kar Wai plays with the tint of the frame to dramatize the backward motion of repetition, compulsion, and the vividness of Yiu-Fai’s life after breaking out of his toxic relationship). And Yiu-Fai wants more. “Stops not being written” turns into “Doesn’t stop being written, doesn’t stop, won’t stop,” and Yiu-Fai can’t say anything because any words he says will be the final verse of a poem he’s finally ready to start writing. All he can do, clutching the tape recorder, is cry. Chang, of course, does not understand this. He thinks, funnily enough, that there was some glitch in the recorder and that the static he hears is artifice rather than pure, unvarnished emotion. Ironically (and irony is the queerest of forms, as Lee Edelman teaches us), this miscommunication allows love to keep being written, it keeps open the question of not just what could have been but what might still be. Love’s resistance to language—it’s always being indirect, miscommunicated, or misinterpreted—keeps open the possibility that love might be coming, may have come, may already be here. 

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In Fouad Elhoury’s On War and Love, Elkhoury’s lover tells him they can no longer be together. It’s terrible timing. Israel is bombing Lebanon and Elkhoury has spent days desperate to hear from her, desperate to know she’s still alive. After some brief pleasantries, she announces that they have to break up. “But we love each other.” “Yes, more than anything else in the world, but I don’t love you the way you want.” “Je ne t’aime pas comme tu veux,” the words themselves, so simple, so monosyllabic, hit like bullets piercing the foundation of a beautiful illusion. What’s more terrifying to Elkoury, the planes bombarding Beirut that he hears outside, or her breath on the phone, silent, resolved, and somehow able to survive such an awful revelation? “Do you really think this is the right moment to say this?” “Is there a right moment to say this kind of thing?” 

We saw On War and Love together at the International Center of Photography a few years ago. Then, I thought it was ingenious to narrate one’s experience with war through the story of a breakup. I thought: this is so humanizing, this is so affecting. As if love is just affective content to render legible the more serious narration of war. Only later did I realize that the reverse is true: this is a story about how love refuses the logic of the emergency, which would defer the personal in favor of more “serious” political issues. Instead, love forces itself on our present when we are least ready for it. For love never arrives on time. It is, as Mari Ruti frames it in The Summons of Love, a “summons” that calls us into realizing who we might be at the moment we’re least expecting it. Elkhoury shows us that love’s work is not limited to the health of the relationship itself, but that it’s in the messiness of love’s aftermath that we realize what it is that’s so special about love in the first place. That’s the impossible possibility of love: it’s only once you’ve lost it that you can articulate what you really had. 

I think about you every day. I used to be ashamed to admit this. I assumed for months that I was the only one suffering, that this was easy for you. Was it easy? Was it hard to tell me, in your own way, that you didn’t love me the way I wanted? Was that a mercy? Did you ever, afterwards, think of our time together as love? 

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I didn’t cry when you rejected me. I didn’t walk away. I even let you put your arm around me as we finished the interminable loop around Fresh Pond. I didn’t ask you to do it. I did everything I could to restrain any emotion from leaking out of my body language, holding myself “naturally.” What was the point of reaching out to you again when a gap had opened up between us? Maybe, that gap was never there; maybe we were two fused subjects walking in lockstep until my declaration, like a performative speech act, cleaved us apart. 

In his last lectures at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes introduces the term “idiorrhythmy” to discuss the tension between our singular and collective selves. We are always slightly out of rhythm, off tempo with the world around us, sometimes to startling effect. Barthes’s example of this “idiorrhythm” is a mother dragging her child by the hand: the mother walks deliberately to her own beat, the child tripping and stumbling as she tries to keep up. Here we have two different rhythms forcefully being unified into one. What about the opposite situation? What happens when you’ve finally found your footing with someone, gotten onto the same beat, and then they say something which changes the tempo of your relationship completely? What do you do? Maybe, you reach out your arm one last time and try to hold onto that rhythm for a little while longer. 

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In Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Trevor can’t say “I love you.” The closest he comes is showing up outside Little Dog’s window one night waving a knife he says he made as a gift. It’s all a pretext, all just some reason to be close to Little Dog. When he comes in, terror strikes him, and he begs Little Dog to tell him he’s not a faggot. “‘I don’t wanna… Please tell me I am not… But But But… Please tell me I am not… I am not a faggot? Am I? Am I? Are you?’” Trevor is scared to admit he’s a faggot because he knows that desire hurts, like Little Dog realizes earlier when he writes, “Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.” It’s not like you’re leading some happy middle-class life and end up experiencing shame just because you’re gay, so all you have to do is come out and everything will be fine (like those “it gets better” people tried to force down our throats). Everything is not fine. Shit’s fucked up. And Trevor can’t bear one more reason for people to humiliate him. One more reason to be seen as expendable. He can’t escape being seen as some white-trash drug addict who’ll end up dead by thirty. “But but but” he might be able to protect himself from the shame of being a faggot and at least save himself the hurt. Save it because he might not survive it. And to not survive would mean losing Little Dog. Tell me I’m not a faggot so I can keep being with you. 

Little Dog can’t say what he really feels, either. “‘Hey,’ he said, half asleep, ‘what were you before you met me?’ ‘I think I was drowning.’ ‘And what are you now?’ he whispered, sinking. I thought for a second. ‘Water.’” Hear the swell of what Freud’s friend calls “oceanic feeling” in Little Dog’s indirect declaration of love. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud summarizes his friend’s concept this way: “It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic.’” “Oceanic feeling” annoys Freud for the hilarious (and also ironic) reason that he does not like to concern himself with feelings, since feelings are not stable enough to form a scientific system. Love—like God—is not so much a concept, but a resistance to conceptualization which allows us to experience some sense of the infinite. And that’s what psychoanalysis offers us in distinction from the sciences. The sciences systematize our access to finite knowledge. Psychoanalysis gives us access to the infinite. Little Dog’s declaration of “oceanic feeling” renders love as something sacred, something holy, in the radical sense that all humans need some feeling that we might transcend our finite selves. 

Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a novel about unspeakable sentences that are nevertheless spoken. The epistolary gesture of a letter from a son written for his mother, who cannot read, spirals into a reckoning with the Vietnam War until queer desire changes the character of the entire text. The form of the sentence itself cannot hold the weight of representing love; instead the sentence breaks down into prose poetry. Here again, we return to Barthes. Discussing love from the perspective of the “enunciating subject” of the lover, Barthes reflects on how the lover’s discourse always fails at the level of the sentence; yet this failure is not nothing: “The words are never crazed (at most perverse), but the syntax is: is it not on the level of the sentence that the subject seeks his place—and fails to find it—or finds a false place imposed upon him by language?” The sentence fails, and yet the words themselves are not crazed, they are not nothing. It’s by the very failure of the sentence to do the work we hope it will that we can keep speaking, keep desiring, keep loving. Little Dog and Trevor fail to say what they really feel so that they might keep loving each other. 

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There’s a beautiful installation on the Somerville Community Path called “The Telephone to Eternity.” It wasn’t there on our first date. Do you remember that day in May, when we first met? I had just left my first serious relationship and felt flattered you’d take the time to meet me. Surely, I wasn’t what you were looking for. To this day, no matter what any of my friends say, I look at you and think you are the most beautiful man alive. I should’ve known from our first date that things would get complicated. I couldn’t even look you in the eye. I kept looking down, so often you made a comment, and I said the stupidest thing that’s ever come out of my mouth (“Oh, you know, I’m Vietnamese; we’re born deferential”). In those beautiful blue eyes, I experienced oceanic feeling. Actually, I experience it still.

“Created as a gesture of love in response to grief and loss, this ‘Telephone to Eternity’ carries no signal but offers a chance to release unspoken words that will be carried by the wind to wherever they need to go.” Unspeakable sentences that are nonetheless spoken. 

I was ready to dial up your number and say “I love you” out loud for the first time. I memorized your number after the first time we decided to “just be friends” after our, um, whatever you call it. I had deleted your number so I couldn’t reach out to you, and after you texted me, I memorized it until it stuck. Stuck even when I didn’t want it. Even after I tried to give you the chance to tell me you had feelings for me, and you rejected me again (and again) and I wanted to have no access to you. It haunted me like the remainder of the love I’d never have again, until I stumbled upon this installation. Somehow, when I reached to start dialing your number, nothing came. Everything was a blur and my friend looked at me confused as I wracked my brain trying to piece the numbers together. Now was the moment to let it all go. If only I could dial your number and reach out to you, one last time.

But of course, I don’t want there to be a last time. I still want the chance to love you. This is why Freud uses mourning to explain the structure of melancholia. For while in mourning, one faces a real impossibility (the person being mourned, unless they are the second coming of Christ, is never going to be alive again); in melancholia one faces a situation that feels impossible, but is not totally so. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud’s example, of course, is unrequited love: you know the love you crave will probably never happen, yet you hold on so dearly to the small chance that it might, even as it tears apart your psychic life. The problem with being a melancholic in love is that instead of being open to treatment, you can’t stop exalting the wound. Jacques Derrida phrases this best in his strangest text, The Post-Card: “I recognize that I love—you—by this: that you leave in me a wound that I do not want to replace.”