Amorous ex/incursions: Love in writings of Badiou, Weil, Fromm, and Barthes

• Main Author: De Chavez, Jeremy C.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2011
• Subjects: Love; Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/5130
• Institution: De La Salle University

My dissertation explores the enabling contributions of love to the practice of ethicopolitical and cultural critique. Engaging with the work of Alain Badiou, Simone Weil, Erich Fromm, and Roland Barthes, I examine love in terms of the following modalities: waiting, giving, and looking. I place the aforementioned thinkers in dialogue with selected literary and cinematic texts to explicate and interrogate the meaningful possibilities of their discourse on love. In my chapter on Alain Badiou, I discuss his ontology, which I draw upon heavily to set the theoretical parameters of my study. I also discuss the logic of love that he develops in his philosophy. Speaking to the problem of pre‐Evental agency that critics of his work identify, I suggest that waiting as attention, as theorized by Simone Weil, might be the closest form of agency that a pre‐Evental (amorous) being can experience. In my discussion of Erich Fromm, I reevaluate his “art of loving” within the constellation of late capitalism. Reading his work through a Lacanian lens, I explore the utility of his prescriptions by examining Chuck Palahniuk’s controversial novel Fight Club. In my chapter on Roland Barthes, I theorize the possibility of cinematic looking that does not depend on the antagonism inherent in the binaries masculine/ feminine and (Gazing) spectator/ (to‐be‐looked‐at) image. Towards this objective, I propose the “amorous look,” a mode of viewing occasioned by cinematic punctual encounters, that I contend is beyond the domain of desire and perversion. I deploy the “amorous look” as I reflect on Aureus Solito’s film Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Olivares (The Blossoming of Maximo Olivares) and its representations of love and waiting.