“How Shall I Say Love … “: Reimagining a Non-relational Geopolitics of Love in the Time of COVID-19

• Main Author: Canoy, Nico A
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2021
• Subjects: love; portal; non-relationality; COVID-19; pandemic; Psychology
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/psychology-faculty-pubs/335; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17441692.2021.2013915?journalCode=rgph20
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

The pandemic as a portal has deeply changed life as we know it; including our homes. While countries continue to strengthen their health systems and policies; marginalized groups in local communities are absorbed; reassembled; and transformed in everyday ‘portals' which generate mutually entangled and composite forces of unification and healing as well as forces of division and wounding. In this commentary; I argue that these forces can be taken as embodying a geopolitics of love already subsumed by intimate; proximal; and mediated relations; therefore leaving out aspects of love that are populated by voids; hollows; and liminalities. Here; I reflect upon Massey's spatial politics vis-a-vis Harrison's notion of non-relationality in order to puncture the representational limits of the geopolitical as a way to transform ‘bad' love (i.e. love that eclipses pains; sufferings; and otherness) while simultaneously not succumbing to a desire for sameness underpinning ‘good’ love (i.e. love that promotes unification and healing). Specifically; I suggest that the nonrelationality of place making and its geographies of nowhereness may lead us back home to love as always already there.