From the Love Studio

What does love study under conditions of its unrequitedness? How can it at once cease to be an object and resist inversion into an idealized subject as the only way to survive? Against the purities, scarcities, redemptions, settlements, and requitals that make it a conscript of anti-politics of vari...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Hypatia 2017, Vol.32 (1), p.199-204
Main Author: ABBAS, ASMA
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Feminist theory
Love
MUSINGS
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:What does love study under conditions of its unrequitedness? How can it at once cease to be an object and resist inversion into an idealized subject as the only way to survive? Against the purities, scarcities, redemptions, settlements, and requitals that make it a conscript of anti-politics of various kinds, love somehow continues to profess and remain a partisan to politics and its possibility, producing the world and often disappearing from it. When so much of that love is waiting to be spoken to, or called back from disappearance, the we and the I must make room for a forgotten you to be spoken to, heard from, grieved with, and offered a world in common. Even speaking as or for oneself in these conditions requires speaking to oneself, as if one were, just for a moment, the beloved, and not the accu(r)sed. This musing's own form and tone is an invitation to that moment, to a political method that counters the shared premises of racism, misogyny, fascism, capital, and the colony, lest our theories and practices claim further casualties: not even the beloved is safe from the wrath of that which seeks the final solution or last apology, encloses in words without excess, and squares away in smug, swift action, which is its own special curse.
ISSN:0887-5367
1527-2001
DOI:10.1111/hypa.12301