Ep. 283: Alain Badiou on Love (Part One)

0:08 Mark: To the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 283 is what is love? And we read the essay what is Love? Which is Chapter 11 of Conditions by Alain Badiou, published in 1992. We also looked at his 2009 book In Praise of Love, which is a conversation between Badiou and Nicolas Truong. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, Madison, Wisconsin. And to maintain my marriage every day I nominally hypothesize the two.

0:41 Wes: This is Wes Alwan and I am from Mars, not Venus. And I'm in Cambridge, which is about as close as you can get to being in Venus without ever having been to Venus, Massachusetts.

0:54 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey announcing the debut of the Amorous Procedure, available on your favorite service. Reviewing event. Encounters between disjunct individuals engaging in sexuated positions from which the truth shall out.

1:07 Wes: In Madison, Wisconsin, Amorous Procedure.com is my favorite porn site.

1:12 Seth: Actually this is Seth Paskin giving my sexuated attestation of the Disjunction from Austin, Texas.

1:23 Wes: That is gross. Sorry, what?

1:27 Seth: Austin?

1:28 Wes: Yep, you said attestation. So not sure I like that.

1:35 Mark: This is such a romantic episode, all this language. Yeah, we wanted to see after doing Badiou last time, which you should listen to that first, I would assume get some something concrete out of this. We had read from Conditions last time and so his original essay from Conditions was not a lot more concrete.

1:56 Wes: Just laughing at Dylan, laughing at concrete.

2:00 Mark: But we supplemented that. The In Praise of Love is a very practical one. There are also multiple lectures of him talking about love online. They all involve some of this pseudo mathematical quanti ontological talk that is very confusing. But you know, he has some actual ideas of how we should look at love differently in the culture.

2:23 Wes: Yeah, that's the hardest sell you've ever done for a philosopher on the show. He has some actual ideas, practical ideas

2:30 Mark: as opposed to Erich Fromm that we did his the Art of Loving before which was all practical ideas. It was like a self help book. This is not a self help book. This is still hoity toity philosophy. That decoding is half the fun. But he does get to the point. I don't know if any of this would help you in your relationships, but at least he identifies some sophists that he's arguing against. Right. Some illusions of like love is not emerging. It's not two people coming together as one. That is a Very weird. You know, that's a powerful poetic image. But if you actually try to do that and live your life that way, that'd be disastrous. And it's also not just, oh, it's just sex with some fancy words on top of it, some social illusions that make the political relationships of the family go down smooth. So those are the two enemies that he's going against.

3:18 Dylan: I want to talk more about why it's not emergent, given that he's clearly a process philosopher and the whole interaction of the two becoming born out of an encounter.

3:27 Mark: Can I just say, I didn't say it's not emergent. I said it's not a merging.

3:33 Dylan: So then I misunderstood what you said because it sounded like you said it wasn't emergent.

3:38 Mark: I think it is emergent.

3:39 Dylan: Okay, there you go.

3:40 Wes: Yeah. Or it's a process, but it's a process.

3:43 Mark: Yeah.

3:43 Wes: Mark was giving the sort of three declarations or two of the three declarations in that second section of some definitions of love that will not be retained. And the first one, he calls it the fusional conception of love. Right. Highly reminiscent. He's not the first person, obviously, to have made this argument. This is the central argument of the symposium, is that love, the fusional model of love, which is Aristophanes model, is not correct. And for Plato, for Socrates, the solution. You know, the definition of love that we get at the end has something to do with reproductive activity in the presence of beauty, which I think is something we can keep in mind as we proceed here. Because similarly, I think Baiju is. Are we saying Badu or Baiju?

4:28 Dylan: It must be Baiju, because. And I was pronouncing it wrong last time because I was saying Baidu, and I looked at his name, and it's definitely not Baidu, because it's B, A, D, I, O, U. So it's Baiju.

4:40 Wes: All right. So similarly, I think Badiou is treating love as a process. Right. Rather than a state. And it's certainly not a fusional state.

4:48 Dylan: It's funny not to call it a state and qualify the kind of state it is, but it's an activity which is, I think, the most important thing for him.

4:56 Wes: It's not a subjective feeling either, which is kind of reminiscent of Fromm a bit and other people. Or it has something in common with eudaimonistic theories of happiness, for instance. Right. Activity in accordance with virtue, as opposed to, Hey, I feel good. It's not like he doesn't talk a lot about Plato, but you can see that in Various other influences in this, including Hegelian stuff.

5:17 Dylan: Just as an opening comment, I just was struck by just the contrast between this chapter, the one we read last time, the stuff we read last time, and this book in Praise of Love. And Mark called it the hoity toity philosophy stuff. I found it almost strangely jargonistic and idiosyncratic compared to what he did in Praise of Love. And then I felt like there was even sort of. There was a main theme regarding the process of love as being the notion of the encounter, the idea of it being an activity between two, which seemed to have a lot of interesting possibility in it.

And then he adds, in this business of very heteronormative sexuated positions regarding the disjunctions that go into the two that have a relationship, which to me seemed completely unnecessary to the broader point that love is a truth relationship. So I found myself kind of wondering, why the heck are you doing this? And how is it necessary? So I'd be interested to find out. Have you guys enlightened me about why that was necessary?

6:31 Seth: Well, if you're looking to me for enlightenment, buddy, you're going to stay in the dark. I don't recall even, and I'm in a very weird headspace these days given a variety of extra philosophical, contextual things that are going on. But I don't even recall the first episode that we did just even a month ago, that the reading of that chapter was as difficult as the chapter on love.

6:58 Dylan: Not even close.

6:59 Seth: Yeah, it was literally like I was reading something completely different or from a completely different writer almost. So I gave up on that one pretty early and went to the In Praise of Love book, which I'm going to say helped put some kind of a framework or some kind of an interpretive context heuristic for me to go back to the other text, which I did finish. But it hardly was illuminating, I'll just put it that way. And the two challenges that I'm going to have here is one, I am as far from being a romantic as probably anyone. And Shannon's always said that she has.

Well, I don't have the actual existential experience to be able to connect with what I think he's trying to get at, or at least it's not well practiced. I guess maybe that's the right way to put it is it's a. I haven't put the time and effort into it that I guess he thinks it requires. But the other piece of it was because I had to fall back on trying to understand this more as an ontological or we talked about. He's got art, politics, the amorous encounter, and science. And so I feel like almost like now I'm like, okay, do I gotta go look at the political and the scientific right?

Or the.

8:20 Mark: Well, the mathematical is the paradigm of the scientific. So there's no saving yourself from that if you really want to understand him. I feel like we got enough. I feel like we got some examples.

8:31 Seth: Yeah. Now I'll go back to reading the Phenomenology of Spirit before I'll finish this book.

8:38 Wes: You mentioned ontology, and I think that's the way you have to approach this essay, which is that, you know, he warns us against trying to define love in terms of the subjective experience of it. And he points us to. So, for instance, in a third definition that will not be retained, this idea of a superstructural or illusory conception of love, something that compensates for lack of a sexual relationship. He's referring to Lacan there. You know, he's going to say it's not actually compensation, it's supplements. And it's not a failure of some sort, because it's not even a relationship.

Love is not a relationship. It is a. So he calls it this production of the truth that the two, not only the one precedes in the situation. I'm not exactly sure what the situation is, but I put, you know, being, question mark in brackets there. Is that the. You know, is this a variation on the word being? But, you know, it reminds me of Hegel trying to work out the relationship between one and many, basically. And love, in a way, sounds like the sort of ontological. You couldn't call it a causal source, but something like that. The world is not just a parmenidean one.

And love is. If you want to think about love, you have to start thinking about how is it that it's not just a parmenidean one. How is it more than that? How is it many? That's what love is the answer to.

10:07 Dylan: Yes, I agree that he's trying to solve a problem that someone like Hegel or someone like Whitehead or other folks are trying to address, which is to talk about multiples that have one, like relationships. He's up to truth for the one. So love is an event encounter or scene of an event encounter. So all these words that make it into a process that's between disjunct entities that he wants to not say, join. But of course it's. And doesn't want to say, just like Wes does. He doesn't Want to say it's a relationship, right? But it is a scene, event, encounter that is an active. I don't see why you don't call it a relationship such that it is a truth. That is the oneness that comes out of it.

11:01 Wes: It's the truth of the disjunction, man. I hear Dennis Hopper saying that in Apocalypse Now. It's the truth of the disjunction.

11:09 Mark: Why it maybe is not a relation is because it's essentially outward facing. So it's an us doing something together. It's a reinterpreting the world. And this is really what made intuitive sense to me that he talked about like the need that you have with someone that you're in love in to like tell them about your day, to interpret your experience for them so that it becomes a shared way of looking at the world. That this is the way that we get out of solipsism and is that we become a society. Later in the In Praise of Love book says it's a foundation for larger civil society.

That it sort of starts with being able to completely, intimately, just throwing off all your poses and your modesty and just all your restraint, giving yourself totally to share the contents of your minds as they're directed outward. So it is not that I know you to the depths of your soul and you know me to the depths of my soul. It is that we together are constructing a different way than either of us had individual of looking at the world.

12:08 Dylan: That all sounds right. I still don't. I'll just go with the fact that it's not a relationship because it's outward facing. And I guess he would say to the extent that it's a relationship, it's the two disjunct individuals partaking of the void and then tied together through their community, their H, you know, tied to their H of X.

12:27 Seth: Maybe take some of the, you know, quasi mystical language out of it. One way to read this is that Badiou is positing love as the explanation for how one self consciousness encounters another self consciousness without turning it into its object. If you're just having sex, or if it's just at the level of desire, or if it's just about the body, you're still very much solipsistic. That's not love because there's still objectified or there's still some objectification in that relationship. And you know, we always talk about intentionality and relationship as part of the intentional structure of consciousness.

So if you ask the question seriously, what is it like to have A relation with another self consciousness where you do not objectify them, which is the great problem that Hegel addresses. And as Dylan said, it's a deep philosophical question. What he's saying is that love is an explanation, or is the explanation for that, but not love as it's been construed throughout history and as the way we do it. It's not love in the encounter of love. It's not the experience of love. In fact, it's something much more serious for him, which is to basically say he's using the term love to describe an ontological and logical structure that really is different than intentional consciousness of the world, which is what we typically think of as the way that we have knowledge, experience and define truth.

That's pretty, pretty interesting.

14:09 Wes: Yeah. The way he puts it is that the identity of love, right, Is prior to the psychology of it. And in fact, the psychology depends on its sort of logical or ontological nature. So that, you know, our experiences of love, we do have those experiences. It's not that they don't exist, but the way that they are arranged. And what he refers to as love, capital L. That's kind of like a law, right, that arranges those experiences in the same way that a law of nature like gravity would arrange. That sort of. Would arrange moving bodies, you know, and.

Or a planetary system. So the thing is, you can't really get at that law from within experience, he says, which is. Makes love quite different from politics, science and art. Right? Love can't think itself is the way he puts it. Then we move on to this idea that love on his account is going to be a solution to a paradox. And the paradox is that we have a radical disjunction between man and woman. That their experience is completely incommensurable, there's no overlap. But on the other hand, that there's only one humanity and one truth for human beings.

It sounds quite anti relativist. So somehow, you know, this later, very, very complicated account of love is going to be an attempt to reconcile those two seemingly irreconcilable things.

15:38 Mark: Let's just touch on Dylan's objection there that this sounds super heteronormative. That he does say, you know, these are the sexuated positions and they have no overlap. And he considers. Does this mean that. I mean that there's like, you know, a masculine science and a feminine science, that there's a masculine philosophy of politics, there's a feminine, and they just can't even know each other. And he says that's not My point, in fact, love is one of the things that makes it. So that's not the case. That fundamentally, I think that the separation is less between these two things that he just.

He says, I'm just going to describe them as male and female, but just this existential gap between any two people. And he does make that explicit at the end of this essay. And then in one of the lectures, he makes it explicit, like right off the top. And I think in the Praise of Love Book as well, because, you know, obviously I think people raise this constantly. And that whole thing that Dylan was objecting to is de. Emphasized in the other sources.

16:31 Seth: I think you and I are going to say the same thing and I'm

16:34 Wes: going to join you guys in my.

16:36 Seth: He absolutely. He talks about the disjunction between. He says man and woman, as I was reading. Well, at least that's the translation. I think masculine and feminine would have been less abrasive and triggering, I suppose. But he basically claims that both are necessary in a true. For love you need both. Whether it's. Each is represented by somebody of the gender that we typically associate with man and woman, he kind of says isn't necessary. But he does suggest that there's such a thing as a. A man and a woman and that they're radically different and radically situated wherever they are and that they're needed for this thing to work, which is not fully explained.

17:21 Dylan: But he does have an aunt. Maybe it's not ontological, but he at least has a definition of the disjunction and of the positions of the. The man and the woman. Man is axiomatically as the amorous position that couples the imperative and motionlessness. These are two things that we'll probably get into more.

17:40 Wes: That's towards the end. Yeah, yeah.

17:41 Dylan: But let me just say it is that there are four components of amorous truth. And man comprises two of them and woman comprises two others. So on the one hand, I think you can point out the heteronormative aspect of it and say, you know, thou doth protest too much, Alain, in that he is just so consistently within the lines of the way in which, you know, you have conventional maleness and conventional femaleness.

18:10 Wes: But let's put.

18:11 Dylan: Let's put that aside. What I found confusing about it seemed to me to be unneeded for the ontological point about the process of love was this extra layer in the section, section 8 on the unity of amorous truth, the sexuated conflict of knowledges. I just didn't even get why that was necessary what that illuminated about it. And if anything, to me it undermined the notion of love as a truth process in which there's an. He probably would object to this, but an ascension or a viewing out in the world amongst to people as being the core aspect of the truth of love as a truth procedure. That's all really interesting. And it seems to me to be undermined by the rest of it.

18:59 Wes: I'll go on record as saying I'm not triggered by using the words man and woman or by heteronormativity. I'm not saying you are. So that's one thing. But although I did, I kind of made fun of this in the beginning because it does sound at certain points like it's basically a very, very jargony, sophisticated version of men are from Mars and women are from Venus. But it's a little unclear to me what's going on here. And I think we have to sort of get into the details of it to figure it out. Because he does begin in that disjunction section by saying what I mean by man and woman is not something that's defined by any empirical state of affairs.

It's not defined by something natural. It's something that's going to emerge from the logic of love itself. So we should take him seriously on that and see. And maybe the critique still applies, but we'll have to see what the logic is and why men and women might be the best way of describing it. Or maybe they're not. Maybe they're not necessary. It's just unclear to me is what is all I'm saying.

19:57 Dylan: I'll just say the fundamental question that I'll have that we get to it is the necessity of sexuated positions, which he says is fundamental to this disjunction. The disjunction is between sexuated positions and it's fundamental to the love the amorous procedure. And it's not clear to me at all why that is required for there to be a relation of two. And it also begs the question about in those sexuated positions, what's the relationship between two members that are not in the sexuated disjunct positions? To me it was just like screaming out that there is a relationship between one and many and that love solves the problem between the one and the many. And he adds all this extra articulation underneath of the many and breaks the many up into other ones. It's just weird to me.

20:45 Mark: So I agree. And I think this would be better as just a Everybody starts as you know, existentialist, solipsistic, lonely beings. And this is a way that we can overcome that absolute disjunction that each of us has with everybody else. On the other hand, I think he has a lot of respect for Simone de Beauvoir. I think he's a reader of that and the whole Kristeva on objection and all that. So he wants to prepare the ground in his way of addressing this for feminist scholarship. So he wants to say the reason these two positions, one of which is typically filled by men, the other is typically filled by women.

The woman one made more sense just the way he characterized it, that the woman is like, all about the love, that one partner is defined by the love. I don't feel like it really has to be the case that one partner is way more into it than the other or that the male has a different view, but it at least sets it up to explain, like, ways in which. So in the lecture, that was basically a comment on a paper. I don't know what paper, but it sounded very much like the what is love? Or like an update of that. And he went on a thing in there about how degrading women and giving them no place in the public sphere.

If they're the ones that are the caretakers of the love, then they're just all about the home and preparing to where the man is out in the world doing stuff. And also the elevation of woman, the cult of womanhood, meaning, like, oh, we men, we worship women. That those are actually one and the same thing. That they're actually the same kind of. He doesn't use the word misogyny, but like the same kind of pigeonholing of a woman's role based on this just basic dynamic that we're familiar with.

22:23 Wes: What's the rationale with that disjunction section for saying that there are these two positions that are totally disjunct. And Mark, in the beginning, I tried to give it some sort of more charitable gloss, which I think is what you're doing. And I thought, he cannot mean that there is no commonality between the experiences of men and women. I thought, does he mean the experience of being a man and being a woman? Which I don't buy that either. I don't think that there is as radical as to this junction either. But he seems to say nothing in the experience is the same from the position of man or from that of woman. That's a pretty strong statement there. And what's the justification for it? Is that an intuition? How is that a starting Point, I don't know what the intuition is for that or why we begin there.

23:05 Mark: Does, say, mean qualitatively or quantitatively the same.

23:08 Seth: I posed this question to Shannon. I just said, you know, like, do you think that men and women experience things differently? And she was like, yeah, of course. Right. And then I said, but then how can we even have any kind of a conversation about anything? How can we have any shared experience? And she said, well. And she made the point, which I thought was like, if you think about it from a Wittgensteinian perspective, you know, can you feel this pain in a certain way? Speaking philosophically, there's a radical disjunction between any two subjectivities in their experience.

You will never experience what I am experiencing, which does not obviate the possibility that we can have communication or shared knowledge or build things or what have you. But there is a radical disjunction. So if I think about that as a potential framework for this, then this is saying that there's nothing shared is basically a subset of that very assertion. But I think the work he's trying to do here, Wes, when he says that, is he's really trying to say the disjunction is radical in the sense of if you create, in talking about love, the two, that becomes one, which is that fusion version of love, you're basically saying the two become the one subjectivity, share the experience.

And he's, I think to say that there's nothing shared, it's a radical disjunction, is just one of the preconditions for him to say that it's a new form of truth, a new form of knowledge that isn't somehow our traditional notion of mathematical or scientific subjectivity.

24:43 Wes: Just to emphasize the radical nature of the disjunction, just to quote a little bit more, because I tried to give some kind of appearance saving explanations for this. Then he kept coming, right? So he says there's not one presentation allocated to woman and another to man. And then zones of overlap or intersection between them. Everything is presented in such a way that no coincidence can be attested between what affects one position and what affects the other. So I call the state of things a disjunction. Sexed positions are disjunct as regards experience in general. It's a pretty strong way of putting it.

25:20 Mark: Seth is right, though, that this is a red herring, that he shouldn't have done this and that I'm not going to say I want. I don't want to interpret him as not sounding like Jordan Peterson. About there being a fundamental male demiurge and a female demiurge. And there's definitely some of that in there in the way that he actually fills this out in the dynamic of two people that somehow end up, well, not sharing consciousness, not merging, but engaging, excising the empty set from each of them and thereby together becoming the two. I think could go to any two self consciousnesses.

25:56 Wes: We're talking about sex and his use of the words man and woman. And we're trying to reduce this to.

26:01 Seth: No, no, no, no, no.

26:02 Wes: You know, the fact that our minds don't coincide with each other and that we are radically disjunct as individual subjectivities. I don't think that's what it is. And I'm not as like I don't have such a negative reaction to this, the whole man, woman being some kind of fundamental ontological thing idea. Just not to say I accept it. It's just I don't dismiss it out of hand as absurd or right wing or something like that.

26:24 Dylan: Let's just say we don't object to the notion of there being masculine knowledge and female knowledge, that those are radically disjunct. What I find unexplored in what he's talking about is why those particular versions of unified experience. Because what he's done is he's taken human experience and divided it into two different ones again. And maybe this explains why he has those ones be incomplete. Right? As far as the human experience, because he has the masculine having two of the four aspects of the amorous procedure and the feminine having a different two aspects of the amorous procedure.

And so he does the Aristophanes thing where he makes it so that those two are incomplete aspects of the thread through humanity for the truth procedure. They're both required for a full truth procedure. And so that disjunction makes it like Aristophanes all over again, right? Two halves that are required to complete a same whole. Except that this whole is a process whole, not a being whole.

27:36 Wes: Yeah, but it's not each of us finding our other half right? And getting into some ecstatic unity with.

27:42 Dylan: That's why it's not a being whole. Right. It excises it from one individual finding the other half. It's still halves of a process. They're both required to form the truth and they're incomplete. So I find it puzzling because half the conversation seems to be all about emergence and then this part of the conversation seems all about lack, all about the things that he was railing against as Saying that he's not earlier on in, saying that it's not about the missingness, that it's not about desire, that you're aimed at that which you don't have because you want to make it part of yourself. It's not aimed at two parts filling the same hole. But then it just seems like his articulation of that emergence is exactly that. An emergence that's born out of two halves that are required to form a whole. Which to me I just found confusing.

28:38 Mark: So I do want us to talk about desire. So what I was describing before, kind of going with. With Seth's idea that maybe the sexuated part was not necessary or something, does make it sound like you could just be friends, right? If you're just two really good friends who talk about everything. Or maybe twins, right? Twins are sort of reputed. Like we are almost the same person because we talk about everything. You might as well be two halves of the same brain. Maybe there are two separate consciousnesses going on in there, but there's things being passed back and forth such that there's a joint view of the world. Well, in the In Praise of Love book, he addresses that. So this is on page 35 to 36.

29:14 Wes: You could be friends with amorous procedure benefits.

29:17 Mark: Well, maybe, yeah. So specifically, surrendering your body, taking your clothes off, being naked for the other, rehearsing these hallowed gestures, renouncing all embarrassment, shouting. All this involvement of the body is evidence of a surrender to love. It crucially distinguishes it from friendship. Friendship doesn't involve bodily contact or any resonances in the flesh or the body. That's why it is a more intellectual attachment, one that philosophers who are suspicious of passion have always preferred. Love, particularly over time, embraces all the positive aspects of friendship.

But love relates to the totality of the being of the other. And the surrender of the body becomes the material symbol of that totality. So it's not just seeing things the same way. It also at least is referring to desire and to lack. That was the. I think the thing he ended with is that, you know, he sounded like Hegel. That there's a tension within love, that on the one hand, it's this outward pointing. We are the two creating our shared special world that only the two of us in constant communication can prepare. But then it's also inward facing at what was this empty set, this lack that was in each of us when we were separate, but has now been excised, subtracted just by our now being a couple.

That is something to do with the Lacanian object A. The object of desire. Wes, were you clear on sort of the relation?

30:38 Wes: I think the idea is that Lacan says, right, there's no such thing as a sexual relation, a relationship. And I think we talked a little bit about that in Vertigo. But part of the idea is, you know, it comes down to the object, what we discussed on the Kristeva episode, that we have a template for relating to others, especially in our romantic and sexual relations to others, that are based on experiences with early caretakers. And some of this involves the fantasy of complete merger, complete symbiosis with the mother, with the object. So this idea of fusion, right, this is just Aristophanes fusion. In other words, what we desire in the other is not something real. It's not something that actually exists. It's not something that we can get from them, really. And that's the problem.

31:31 Dylan: Is it different than the reason that there is no sexual relationship? Is that there's sexual, but there's no relationship?

31:37 Mark: I think this was in. Was it in Annie hall or Husbands and Wives? One of those. Woody Allen. It's like, you know, we just had an affair. We just had sex. Each of us had a good time. Each of us had our own good time. I think it was. Liam Neeson was involved in this somehow. So there's no shared. Even a simultaneous orgasm. It's not a shared orgasm.

31:54 Wes: You know, we're related to some fantasy or to some ideal rather than to the person themselves. Remember from the Vertigo episode, I just want you to love me for who I am? And the idea is that there is no loving her for who she is. There's loving her for who she is, reminiscent of, which is mom.

32:16 Seth: Ultimately, page 191 is the heavier text version of addressing. So, first off, Mark, I'd like to clarify that I didn't say that the sexuated stuff is unnecessary. What I was saying was that the claim that the sexuated positions are disjunct is not saying anything more than saying that two subjectivities themselves are radically disjunct. In that way, the sexuatedness of the bodies in love is of critical importance. I'm just saying that claiming that they're disjunct is not something specific to the sexuatedness. It doesn't seem to me. But on page 191, he's talking about sexuality as it relates to an experience of identity or the 1, or this disjunction, which is the 2. So he says, furthermore, it is only in love that bodies have the purpose of Marking the two. The body of desire is the corpus delicti, the delecti of the self.

33:13 Mark: Like a crime scene.

33:14 Seth: Yes. It secures the one in the guise of the subject. Only love marks the two by a sort of letting go of the object. It is at the point of desire that love fractures the one in order that the two occur in supposition. And then he goes through this long thing that I'll skip and just add this last point. Only love exhibits the sexual as a figure of the two. It is therefore also the place where it is stated that there are two sexuated bodies and not only one. So in other words, you can have the sexual without love, but it's not the event that creates the two, right? Without love, the sexual does not make the event of the two possible, right?

33:57 Mark: It involves commitment. It involves. I thought of a performative right that he talks about. Saying I love you is actually part of that creation. It's not the only thing, of course, but like, yes, it starts with a chance encounter or the sexual event, something that incites it. But then by adding love to it, you're basically naming the unnamable, right? You're naming this thing that is not a relation, it's something we're doing together. You know, it's pointing at something and saying, that's love. That is an object in the world, it is real. So even though that's technically false, it's not like when Sartre says, oh, you're making an object out of that, that's bad.

It's actually okay to make it out like this is the way it's supposed to work is that by this activity, Part of this activity is just self perpetuating. You know, it's like a literal social construction that you together are saying, yes, we're in love, we're in love. Like that. And doing the things every day that involve being in love and talking to each other, sharing that space, making love, making a baby. That can be a huge activity that becomes a focal point and changes you fundamentally in your relationship. All these things are the creation of this persistent object or state.

35:11 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting in this following section on love and desire, right, he has that great phrase, love fits through desire like a camel through the eye of the needle. That's right after he's gone on a kind of little Lacanian jack about. The object of desire is not the other subject, a particular person, desire. They're not the cause of our desire. It's not even their body that's the cause, that's his Way of saying that it's this other fantasy or it's the object or something like that. So when you love someone, you know, he'll say something like the body that is the object of your desire is not really the same thing as the body that is the object of your love.

And he gives something that sounds like a causal theory of reference where the body subject that is an object of love is descent of an event in which the body was first encountered. So it's hard for me to explain exactly what that means, except that there's a history there. Right. I think Mark was getting at this. You know, you meet someone, there's a relationship that is elaborated. There are certain declarations. At some point, maybe there is something performative about it. And the whole history of that constructing together transforms. Right.

What even a body is to us. Love marks the two by a letting go of the object.

36:30 Mark: Is it worth making? You know, maybe one of our final points for part one here, the difference between the two and a couple, that it's a matter of perspective that a couple is what two people who are in a relationship. And even just saying they're in a relationship. That is what it looks like from the outside. Right. From the perspective of the three, from any. But it's the two people that create their own secret world. I was thinking of that Peter Gabriel song Secret World. If you are aware of that, make it up. But this is literally what he is describing. That whenever you have a relationship, it's those shared memories and perspectives and the way that you influence each other and sort of creating that little space. In that sense, being the two is just not something that anybody else who's outside of that situation can perceive as such.

37:19 Seth: Yeah. In fact, I think somewhere he says, as soon as you start talking about the couple, you've introduced that third party perspective. Which is why he uses the term the two as opposed to a couple. Because a couple exists already from the perspective of the social or from a third party that's saying, oh, you guys are such a cute couple.

37:40 Mark: Yeah, I never thought I would be relieved whenever I see something Sartrean that like, oh, that's normal because Sartre is such a freaking loon. But the fact that he has things like that, I understand the whole idea of. No, no. Each consciousness is sort of a completely free open ended thing. But we try to make objects of ourselves and of each other. And so that's the danger that is always coming. And there's definitely strains of that in Badu that love is this space of open Infinite possibility. It's a way of fitting infinity within time. He says at some point, which is, I thought was pretty cool.

And you don't have to have some sort of religious. Love is eternal and it will last even after we are both dead. It's not that kind of infinity. And he just, in fact, sees all the sort of mystical takes on love. We're talking about literal fusion between two people. But it's only a short step between that and what he actually doesn't like in Plato, which is that it's not just me and you, it's me and you and God. Basically, that the way he's interpreting Plato is the way that theologians interpreted him in this respect, that I'm really not even loving you.

I'm loving the divine, the wonderful through you. It's just, you know, that you are some sort of conduit. And he just thinks all that bring in anything otherworldly like that is just a load of crap that you don't need, that you can have an infinity of richness available. Just being more worldly about it.

39:10 Dylan: He's adamant about, especially in the Praise of Love Book, about how much work all of this is and trying to underline the activity of love as being a lot of work. It's not simple. Truth making is tough business as far as Badiou is concerned.

39:28 Mark: So what is the truth? This seems like a basic thing, but, like, it's a truth procedure.

39:32 Dylan: Love is a truth procedure like the other three. There are four truth procedures for Badiou.

39:37 Mark: Yeah.

39:38 Dylan: Politics, science, art, and love.

39:40 Mark: And even though I was positing that it's, well, like this shared world, that's the thing that we're discovering. No, it's actually the truth is the truth of difference is some insight about the fact that we are separate. And knowing that you have to be really intimate to have the proper perspective and the knowledge that is worthy or, you know, something that raises the level of philosophy before it's merely degraded to knowledge of what actual otherness amounts to. Which I guess is sort of like in the In Praise of Love book, they do bring up Levinas and how he's a little different than Levinas, but just the idea that for Levinas, the whole point of ethics is like grasping the other as other.

And for Badiou, like, that's along the right track, but that still sounds like it's all about the individual's experiences, that I'm not literally grasping your consciousness. I'm just kind of grasping that you're another. It's all still about, like, Even though it's through the ethical stance, transcending my solipsism and my self centeredness, it doesn't do it in quite the right way. According to Badiou.

40:41 Wes: In the next half we should talk about the conditions for the existence of humanity dysfunction. So that's section four. It'll be important to trying to unravel all this other stuff about how love relates to humanity.

40:55 Mark: Truth is going to be generic. It is something that, despite the radical separateness of the sexes or of the individuals, something that we can all share. And what humanity really amounts to as enlivened by philosophy, is having these truths that the individual truth procedures gain, I don't know, activated, highlighted, put out there. And that's what we have to each one of us as a philosopher, has to be a lover, has to be a poet, has to be a political activist, has to be at least a curious person. It's not an actual scientist or mathematician, an amateur scientist. This is what the point of being alive is, is to have these things activated. And the point of being alive means you're achieving humanity, right?

41:37 Wes: So rather than being, you know, he uses this phrase, objective, predicative trait, it's not that there are these qualities, universal necessary conditions in terms of properties for being a human being, but rather we are arguments in a function, in a process, when we are human. And that function, the humanity function, is something that he will say supports at least one generic procedure. I like the word process instead of procedure, but the processes of sciencing or loving or arting or politicking. When you do those things, when you enter into those activities, that's when you become human and fill the variable for the humanity function.

42:22 Dylan: And that's how truth is born out of the fourfold knot of those truth procedures.

42:28 Mark: I thought she was going to love me, but she just scienced me.

42:31 Dylan: You were blinded by science, she blinded

42:34 Wes: me with science thing disaster.

42:37 Mark: So if you want to hear all that, come back for part two. Supporters can do that, right? It should be the next thing in your feed if you support us through Apple. It's not going to show up till next week, otherwise should be there already.