To Love Love (or "Please, don't mind me")

“What is it that you humans want?
Do you want to be so thoroughly together that you’re never at any time apart? If that’s what you want, I’d be glad to weld you together, to fuse you into a single person, instead of being two separate people, so that during your lifetime as a single person the two of you share a single life, and then, when you die, you die as a single person, not as two separate people, and you share a single death there in Hades. Think about it: is this your hearts’ desire? If this happened to you, would it bring you happiness?

The starting-point is for you to understand human nature and what has happened to it…

…Each person’s shape was complete: they were round, with their backs and sides forming a circle. They had four hands and the same number of legs, and two absolutely identical faces on a cylindrical neck. They had a single head for their two faces (which were on opposite sides), four ears, two sets of genitals, and every other part of their bodies was how you’d imagine it on the basis of what I’ve said. They moved around in an upright position, as we do today, in either of their two forward directions; and when it came to running, they supported themselves on all eight of their limbs and moved rapidly round and round, just like when acrobats perform that circular manoeuvre where they stick their legs out straight and wheel over and over.

Now, their strength and power were terrifying, and they were also highly ambitious. They even had a go at the gods.

So Zeus and the rest of the gods met in council to try to decide what to do with them.

Zeus said, “I think I can see a way for the human race to exist, but to be weakened enough to start behaving with some moderation…”

…With these words, he cut every member of the human race in half, just as people cut sorb-apples in half when they’re going to preserve them, or cut an egg in two with a hair.

It was their very essence that had been split in two, so each half missed its other half and tried to be with it; they threw their arms around each other in an embrace and longed to be grafted together. As a result, because they refused to do anything without their other halves, they died of starvation and general apathy.”



“Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved’s absence; actually a preposterous situation: the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory.

But isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent?

Absence persists — I must endure it. Hence I will manipulate it: transform the distortion of time into oscillation, produce rhythm, make an entrance onto the stage of language. Absence becomes an active practice, there is a creation of a fiction which has many roles (doubts, reproaches, desires, melancholies)... To manipulate absence is to extend this interval, to delay as long as possible the moment when the other might topple sharply from absence into death.

Am I in love? — Yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

So it is a lover who speaks and who says: I am engulfed, I succumb…”