In the name of Love, the amorous subject is prepared to burn himself up to the point of destruction within that exhausting wound like a madman for whom duration has no meaning. If we are blessed with enough courage and good fortune, he says, then the object of our desire is the one most likely to destroy us.
For the terrible truth is that we have no real happiness except that of ruinous expenditure. What makes blissful is to betray the world of utility, the world of work, the world of self-preservation:
"Erotic passion has no tolerance for health, not even bare survival. It is for this reason that love is the ultimate illness and crime. Nothing is more incompatible with the welfare of the human species."
This is certainly the case when love is unrequited:
"One wastes away; expending health and finances in orgies of narcosis, breaking down one’s labour-power to the point of destruction, pouring one's every thought into an abyss of consuming indifference. At the end of such a trajectory lies the final breakage of health, ruinous poverty, madness and suicide."
But it can also be the case even when love is returned:
"There are times when the morbid horror of love infects the beloved, or one is oneself infected by the passion of another, or two strains of love collide, so that both spiral together into a helix of strangely suspended disintegration … Each competes to be destroyed by the other … to exceed the other in mad vulnerability. When propelled by an extremity of impatience this can lead to suicide …"
Or murder.
Of course, it has to be admitted that neither outcome is common; most lovers seek security within the confines of bourgeois marriage and "conspire to protect each other from the lethal destiny of their passion … relapsing into the wretched sanity of mutual affection".
But, asks Nick Land, isn’t it the case that a love that doesn’t end tragically is always at some basic level disappointed ...?
See: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), pp. 189-90.
Note: this is a revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's on 28 Feb, 2006 as part of a lecture series entitled Thanatology. Those interested in reading a related thanatological fragment should click here.
Note: this is a revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's on 28 Feb, 2006 as part of a lecture series entitled Thanatology. Those interested in reading a related thanatological fragment should click here.
