stupid love
Music: Rufus Wainwright: Want One (2003)
This weekend I've been taking it easy to get over my cold. I've cooked a little, cleaned a little, tried to find Cocteau's Orpheus Trilogy at three different video stores and the school library (the school library was closed yesterday, inexplicably; I may try again today). And I've written a little.
Dale works apace on our co-authored/channeled book chapter on Jack Spicer. It's going so well on his end that I suspect we'll reverse the authorial order (well, we all know it's Jack's ghost, but after that, Dale is steering this puppy). I'm excited with what he's generating: leave it to a poet to write pretty. More details on that strange piece of prose soon.
Meanwhile, I squeezed out some new paragraphs on the love essay, which will also be the topic of my talk at the UNT student conference next month, and probably an "on the road" talk for another year or so. Now that I have a copy of Avital Ronell's Stupidity in front of me, that concept is taking on a much larger role in the essay. What I find exciting about Ronell's rumination on love's stupidity is that it sort of jives with that Kierkegaard said about "Socratic love" in his dissertation on irony: love is irony, the mismatch of form in an unstable way, which is why, as Lacan says, "it's not working out." So the paper will flow with introduction, Lacan on Love as a "failed" relationship; the false promise of love as identification in rhetoric; love as another word for kitsch; and a conclusion that argues we need to reimagine love as irony and abandon the promise of unification that structures most contemporary understandings of rhetoric. I'm pasting in the essay thus far, with new name and all:
For the Love of Rhetoric, or, Love is Shit, with Continual Reference to Kenny and Dolly
Islands in the stream/That is what we are/No one in between/how can we be wrong/Sail away with me to another world/And we rely on each other uh huh From one lover to another uh huh
--Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, "Islands in the Stream"[1]
Although the Bee Gees originally penned "Islands in the Stream" as an R&B single for Diana Ross, they awarded the ditty to Kenny Rogers who subsequently released it as a country duet with Dolly Parton in the late summer of 1983. Had the song remained a rhythm and blues disco-dance number, it is still likely that it would have made it into the Billboard Top 100 list, yet its chicken-fried version by Kenny and Dolly catapulted the tune into the pop and country cross-over stratosphere, earning both artists another number one spot on the Billboard pop chart and the Gibb brothers recognition by the BMI as the authors of the most licensed song of 1984.[2] The irony of the success of "Islands in the Stream" is that the tune is roundly recognized today as one of the worst pop songs of all time, now a kitschy favorite at karaoke bars across the country and a handy cultural reference for a superficial and naive brand of puppy love.[3]
I open this essay with reference to Kenny and Dolly's pop-love for three reasons. First, the opening lyrics are among the stupidest ever penned in the name of love: "Baby, when I met you there was peace unknown/I set out to get you with a fine tooth comb." Such a sentiment is like telling one's lover that s/he was discovered much like one does fleas on a dog or the hidden evidence of a crime scene. Because the lyric is unquestionably idiotic, it represents what love often does to us: it renders us dumb, it pushes us to the limits of representation. Love is the name for a special kind of stupidity. Certainly the sentiment, driven for rhyme as much as meaning, is stupid in a more mundane sense, however, there is a way in which the lyric registers the frequent effect of love as something that makes us trip over ourselves, stutter, or fall into a thorny hedge posturing in front of a desired lover.[4] "Islands in the Stream" is thus doubly stupid in a way that I will argue has important implications for rhetoric.
Although the fine-toothed quest for love makes for good fun-poking, it is also symptomatic of a powerful conception of love that resides in the popular imagination: the love of pure identification through complete and total knowledge of another. Searching for one's lover with a precise instrument characterizes love as an examination, or as a search for the hidden secrets of another, an obsession with his or her intricate details. Let us call this obsessive love, or better, the love of interrogation--a love intensely focused on the Other as an object of scrutiny.[5] In this respect, a second reason I've opened with reference to Kenny and Dolly is that "Islands in the Stream" reflects the soul-deep desire to escape death in the arms of an all-knowing beloved. It is not coincidental that song's title is the same as a lesser-known Hemmingway novel about a lonely, hard-drinking man in search of himself and a reconciliation with his lover. Perhaps for Kenny, Dolly, and Hemmingway, "islands in the stream" evokes the seventeenth meditation by John Donne, who, upon hearing a bell tolling softly for another recognized the bell also had a message for him: "you too will die." In working through the way in which the deaths of others portends our own, Donne wrote "no man is an island, entire to itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." Is this not this Kenny and Dolly's sentiment and the secret wish of Hemmingway's protagonist? "Islands in the stream/that is what we are/No one in-between/How can we be wrong?" Although Kenny and Dolly's understanding of "the main" is much more isolationist than Donne would prefer, it suggests the lovers identify themselves as islands connected by the common substance of love.
Finally, a third reason that I've opened with reference to Kenny and Dolly's song is that the song itself is a rhetoric that continues what is arguably the most entrenched rhetorical theory of love: the transcendent unification of souls first advanced in Plato's Phaedrus (except without the pensile breasts). Relaxing in their loosely fitting togas under a plane-tree by the Ilissus, Socrates and Phaedrus flirtatiously discuss the merits of the "true art" of discourse, eventually concluding that the more instrumental and manipulative approaches to oratory taught by Sophists like Lysias are a sinful affront to the gods. For Plato's Socrates, good persuasion speaks to the soul of the hearer by appealing to some underlying, spiritual commonality (indeed, we are all part of the main!). Good rhetoric is that which attends the spiritual needs of an individual, sometimes even against what he would prefer, by appealing to memories of the divine (anamnesis).[6] As John Durham Peters observes, for "Socrates the issue is not just the matching of minds, but the coupling of desires. Eros, not transmission, would be the chief principle of communication."[7] In the critique of writing at the end of the dialogue, Plato's Socrates worried that new technologies of communication would weaken the import of desiring, further alienating individuals from each other. True persuasion, understood as an act of both erotic (eros) and transcendent love (agape), promised to bridge individuals faced with the "potential for distance and gaps."[8] Understood as a form of love, for Plato true or good persuasion traverses or bridges a division or gap with a touch of madness (a stupidity of sorts, to be sure), which is precisely what the lyrics of "Islands in the Stream" betoken.
Stupidity, identification, and transcendent unification: these are the three rhetorical dimensions of love that are often yoked to modes of seduction--erotic and otherwise--in the centuries since Plato advanced his theory. Unfortunately, today there are few rhetorical theories that explicitly attempt to detail a relationship between rhetoric and love.9 In contemporary rhetorical scholarship, the most widely read and well-known theories that might be said to link them are threefold. The first is Wayne Brockreide's suggestion that rhetors adopt the ideal of "arguers as lovers," which entails a mutual respect for one's interlocutors and a valuation of the relationship over the outcome of rhetorical encounters.[10] The second is Jim Corder's call for understanding "argument as emergence" within an over-arching ethic of accommodation such that we better understand why "rhetoric is love."11 The third is Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin's "invitational rhetoric" paradigm, which opposes a presumed, agonistic link between patriarchy and persuasion with a feminist posture of hospitality.[12] Although these approaches share Plato's concern with the importance of sensual encounter for bridging gaps, they seem to ignore love's stupidity and to abandon the metaphysical promise of identification and spiritual transcendence that underlies the entrenched view.
In the decade since Foss and Griffin introduced the invitational paradigm, however, theories of love have become increasingly common in the theoretical humanities: beginning with 2000's All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks has written numerous books and has become one of the most visible contemporary theorists of love.[13] In her influential Witnesing: Beyond Recognition, Kelly Oliver has called for imagining "love beyond domination" and a new ethic of "response-ability."[14] Even Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "the world-renowned authors of Empire" who are more renowned for their celebration of the "new barbarians" and the agonistic uprising of "the multitude," have argued "a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude."[15] Yet despite what appears to be a larger theoretical trend in humanities scholarship,[16] few rhetoricians have endeavored to develop Brockereide and Corder's propositions further,[17] nor has the invitational view been elaborated beyond what some scholars see as a relatively facile and misguided rejection of agonism.[18]
Are rhetoricians reluctant to take the "turn to love" that has been made in the theoretical humanities? I think so, and this essay endeavors to explain why with continual reference to Kenny and Dolly's song, "Islands in the Stream." More specifically, in this essay I argue that rhetoricians have failed to theorize love for two, interrelated reasons. First, love has been avoided in theoretical discussions because it is already the assumed dynamic underwriting persuasion; love has been indirectly theorized already in terms of identification and the (tacitly) transcendent promise of unification. I suggest that this is demonstrable in the widely taught concepts of identification, division, and "consubstantiality" found the work of Kenneth Burke. The dominant idea of persuasion as the creation of identification or other-knowledge over some common, shared substance is the implied love theory of rhetorical studies, and to better theorize an explicit theory of love, I will argue that we must overcome the indwelling, Platonic idealism of Burkean identification in favor of a more psychoanalytic understanding of persuasion.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, I argue that rhetoricians have avoided theorizing love because of the stupidity it necessarily entails. We have avoided love because of its close proximity to naive idealism or "kitsch" in Western culture-that to speak of love in theoretical scholarship (or at least in work that does not concern literary art or film) risks being thought of as Kenny and Dolly are today, that one will appear trite or cheesy.[19] Originally understood as artwork that is worthless, pretentious, and overly sentimental, kitsch is a German concept has gradually come to denote something that covers-over or hides an unpleasant truth.[20] Insofar as the dominant fantasy of love in the West is, in fact, the impossible Platonic ideal of transcendent unification (e.g., "you complete me," or, "no one in between/how can we be wrong?"), to invoke love in theory necessarily tempts kitsch. We have been afraid to approach love as a theoretical endeavor because we do not quite know how to reckon with its idiotic dimension, that part of love that makes us stutter or shudder. It is also in this respect that dismissals of Brockriede and Corder's calls, or criticisms of Foss and Griffin's invitational paradigm as "utopian," are akin to the cynical repulse of gaudy Valentine's Day decorations: both theory and red cardboard hearts are criticized for attempting to cover-over, deny, or disguise the ugly truth of human alienation, aggression, and evil. Any theorization of the relationship between love and rhetoric must consequently address love's stupid utopian intimation or risk its immediate repudiation.
In order to explain how (a) rhetoric assumes love; and (b) how this assumption tempts kitsch, this essay proceeds in three parts. In the first part Lacan's understanding of love as a (stupid) fantasy of unification is explained and then compared to Kenneth Burke's theory of persuasion as identification. Understood in relation to what Lacan terms the objet a, identification concerns a gesture toward an elusive but tantalizing "something more" in others that is reducible to the promise of transcendent love. Once the tacit connection between persuasion and love is made explicit, I then turn to an explanation of kitsch in part two. A comparison of the well-known duet by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton to the paradigm of invitational rhetoric shows how both are homological representatives of a Platonic idealism better described as kitsch. Finally, the third part concludes the essay by arguing a rhetoric of true love entails a rejection of kitsch and reckoning with the ontological dualism that grounds rhetorical studies, a dualism that reduces love to its true and bare, minimal formal relation: irony.
I. On(e) the One
What constitutes the basis of life, in effect, is that for everything having to do with the relations between men and women, what is called collectivity, it's not working out. It's not working out, and the whole world talks about it, and a large part of our activity is taken up with saying so.
--Jacques Lacan[21]
In what is perhaps his most famous seminar of 1972 and 1973, Lacan elaborated what was to become his most well known arguments about love.[22] According to Lacan, the enigma of love has endured for centuries because humans have trouble admitting that it is "not working out," and so we talk about the possibility of its working out endlessly, as idiots, dumb before the truth. Like Gibb's opening lyric in "Islands in the Stream," love renders us stupid because we cannot speak about it without sounding silly.[23] As easy as it is to find popular music that blindly asserts the possibility of a transcendent love in idiom of idiocy, it is also just as easy to find a recognition of Lacan's seemingly cynical assertion: from the Main Ingredient's 1972 gold single "Everybody Plays the Fool" to Leo Sayer's classic "Fool for your Love," love's stupid dimension is well-acknowledged-or as the J. Geils Band would have it in "Love Stinks," flatly rejected. Yet despite the fact that at some level we acknowledge that "it's not working out," the stupidity of love is allowed to continue, as Avital Ronell explains:
There is an undeniable pleasure seeking in the empire of the idiotic, a low-burning delight in stupid behavior and activity. One needs only to be reminded of the pleasure domes of the stupid by which constructed delights are dosed out. Does one really need to be reminded of watching embarrassingly stupid shows on TV, vegging out, cultural studies . . . . when is the prohibition on stupidity lifted and when, finally, can one be stupid? When you're in love, for instance. When you call each other by stupid names, pet names, summoning declensions of your own private idiolect in amorous discourse. Love indicates one of the few sites where it is permitted publicly to be stupid.[24]
"Islands in the Stream," of course, presumably represents the publicization of a private amorous idiolect, a song once received-as Steve Perry of Journey once sang-with "open arms," but now recognized as benchmark of stupidity.
Given Lacan's hard line against the possibility of love "working out," Dylan Evans suggests that "it might seem surprising that Lacan himself dedicates a great deal of his seminar to speaking about love."[25] Yet he does so for a number of reasons that are encapsulated in Lacan's statement that "the only thing that we do in analytic discourse is speak about love."[26] First, the babble of the therapeutic setting between the analyst and analysand is always about relationships with other others, since subjectivity as such emerges dyadically in childhood (usually between the child and the mother). Second, even though love cannot be talked about, the impossibility of doing so motivates our (somewhat foolish) attempts to do so; in the Lacanian register, motive as such is a reaction to some negative or absence (e.g., "lack"). Third, stupidity denotes a state in which we are not (fully) aware of what we are saying, that something speaks from us beyond us (viz., the subject of the unconscious)-like the line about the "fine toothed comb"; in clinical practice, psychoanalysis works through the transference to produce the stupidity-that is, the short-circuiting of full consciousness and rationality-that leads to insights about one's self and one's analyst. In this respect "stupidty" is not always a bad condition, but the proviso of love that leads to potential insight.[27] Finally, and most importantly, love is the center of analytic discourse because it denotes a fundamental, structural truth to human subjectivity we stupidly (and stubbornly) repress: "the truth, the only truth that can be indisputable because it is not, that there's no such thing as a sexual relationship . . . ."[28]
There is No Sexual Relationship
In early seminars until the very last, Lacan insisted on the fundamentally illusory character of all forms of love, platonic, erotic, and spiritual. Although courtly love represents one of the most visible fantasies of love,[29] love as such references a fundamental, ontological disjunction between two kinds of experiences in the world (e.g., "subject positions"). In this respect love is a supplement, not an affect.[30] For Lacan love is a function or a consequence of a radical disjunction between two people.[31] "What makes up for the sexual relationship is," notes Lacan, "quite precisely, love."[32] Although we associate affect with this thing love, the thing as such is the epiphenomenon of an impossible relationship; to speak of it is a reminder that I am not you, and that you are not me-that, in fact, there is no relationship between us, only endless symbolic reminders of that impossibility. When speaking of Lacan on love, argues Alain Badiou, "it is necessary to keep the pathos out of passion, error, jealousy, sex, and death at a distance. No theme requires more pure logic than love."[33] The name for the logic of love is "disjunction." What do we mean, then, by disjunction?
Musically, a disjunction is a shift in the notes of a melody. In logic, it designates the function of the term "or" that leads to truth statements. And then there is the disjunction of informal logic, which implies "one or another." What seems common to these uses of the term is that disjunction implies an absolute choice between two things, a fundamental binary. For Lacan, there is a fundamental binary choice made for us at birth: either you are a man or you are a woman. You had no choice in this choice, and once it is made (e.g., by you parents, by "society"), you cannot undo it. In other words, for Lacan sexual difference is ultimately a forced choice in the symbolic between two categories of experience. Now, it is important to underscore this forced choice is not determined by one's biology, for it is entirely possible to changes one's biological sex (and the mutability of the body, or the parasitic nature of the symbolic, is a topic that interests Lacan).[34] Even when one elects to do so, as is the case when one attempts to resolve gender dysphoria via sexual reassignment (e.g., transexuality), it is almost impossible to escape the symbolic tokens of choice that were forced upon you. In short, sexual difference or "sexuation" is a symbolic process.
Of course, Lacan's statement, "there is no sexual relationship," seems prima facie absurd. "Sure there is a sexual relationship," readers may be thinking (and with luck, about last night!). What is key here, however, is the equivocation with the word "sex": the act of physical intercourse marks the supposed unification, or Oneness, of each sex. In other words, sexual relationship denotes both the cultural fantasy of the unification of two souls, as well as the possibility of a conjuction between the two sexes. Fetching a more stark logic from Lacan, Badiou explains the formal structure of love in terms of a series of theses:
1. There are two positions of experience. "Experience" here is to be taken in its most general sense, presentation as such, the situation. There are two presentative positions: the two positions are sexuated, and one is named 'woman,' the other 'man.' . . . 2. The two positions are absolutely disjunct. "Absolutely" must be taken literally: nothing in experience is the same for the positions of man and woman. Nothing. That is to say: the positions do not divide up experience . . . . Everything is presented in such a way that no coincidence can be attested to between what affects the one position and what affects the other. We will call this state of affairs 'disjunction.' The sexuated positions are disjuncted with regard to experience in general.[35]
That is, the experience of male and the experience of woman do not overlap, but are wholly distinct from birth to death. Badiou continues that, consequently, the disjuction cannot be known directly. If that were the case, then a "third position"--a mediation--would be possible. "The idea of a third position engages an imaginary function: the angel," continues Badiou, which connotes the possibility of a transcendent vantage, a psychic mind-meld, that is materially impossible.[36]
So, when Lacan says that "there is no sexual relationship," he means both that (1) the experience of the sexes, and by extension people in general, are radically disjunct; and (2) sexual intercourse is not a practice where whereby two become "one" in the act.[37] The impossibility of this relationship is why love and sexual intercourse are frequently commingled, if not outright confused--why both meanings of "sex" are implicated in the same logic. That there is no sexual relationship means not only that the "male" experience cannot be the "female" experience and vice-versa, but also that sexual intercourse is frequently a means by which individuals attempt to overcome or hide or repress their radical disjuction. One is tempted to believe that this much is obvious, however, any viewing of Divorce Court or, as is likely, any recounting of one's own romantic past (especially that of one's teenage years), quickly reveals that "it's not working out," but we keep trying anyway. Hence, "what makes up for the sexual relationship is, quite precisely, love."[38] This is to say, love is the token of a failure of reconciliation. Love is failure. Love is the impossibility of becoming One.
Identification and the Gesture of Something More
When we understand that love is the supplement of a failed or impossible relationship, then we can begin to decipher courtly or romantic love as a kind of deception. Falling in love is a dumbness toward the impossibility that another person can "complete me" or "make me whole" by recognizing me, by knowing me through and through, by identifying with my soul. In this respect, Lacan asserts that,
as a specular image, love is essentially deception. It is situated in the field established at the level of pleasure reference, of that sole signifier necessary to introduce a perspective centered on the Ideal point, capital I, placed somewhere in the Other, from which the Other sees me, in the form I like to be seen.[39]
For Lacan love is specular because it involves a kind of recognition or acknowledgement from another. On one level, this recognition concerns the ability of another to "reflect" my ideal self back to me, her ability to "see" me as I want to see myself. Yet, on a deeper level the recognition of love concerns a "paradoxical, unique, specified object we call the objet a," an object that provokes the idea that there is something more to one's lover than the lover him or herself, something "beyond" them that Lacan explains is the fundamental dynamic behind psychoanalytic treatment: "the analysand says to his partner, to the analyst, what amounts to this---I love you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you---the objet petit a . . . ."[40] Describing love's deception vis-à-vis this "something more" or objet a is especially significant for rhetoric, for it explains the fundamental link between persuasion and love: persuasion is the promise that a rhetor/lover can produce the objet a. In short, all rhetorical appeals concern the gesture of something more.
Whenever we are concerned with the gesture of something more---the deceptive promise that I can recognize you and produce something more in me than me---we are in the domain of desire. Kenny and Dolly's lyrics, "you do something to me that I can't explain/ hold me closer and I feel no pain," signals this inexplicable "something" that is beyond each of them that stimulates their desiring for each other. For Lacan, desire must be understood in relation to the objet a, which is its cause, and in strict distinction from two related forms of human motivation: need and demand. Human need refers to, more or less, basic biological needs (e.g., food, shelter, and so on). Demand, however, refers to a request for something (an object, an action, a gesture, and so on) from another human being. As Joan Copjec explains, the distinction between need, demand, and desire orbits the status of the object that is requested or that sets motives into motion:
On the level of need the subject can be satisfied by some thing that is in the possession of the Other. A hungry child will be satisfied by food-but only food. . . . It is on the next level, that of demand, that love is situated. Whenever one gives a child whose cry expresses a demand for love, a blanket, or food, or even a scolding, matters little. The particularity of the object is here annulled; almost anything will satisfy-as long as it comes from the one whom the demand is addressed. Unlike need, which is particular, demand is, in other words, absolute, universalizing.[41]
Demand thus represents a push for "something more" from another than a particular object (as any object will do)-something paradoxically tantalizing but unattainable. When the person making the demand begins to realize that this "something more" is impossible to describe or to get, she transitions from demand to desire (e.g., "you do something to me that I can't explain"). For Lacan, desire is a continual pulsation of motivating energy; the object that stimulates desire, the objet a, cannot be possessed or desire would cease.
Sexual desire is the most familiar form of desiring that is stimulated by various objects. For example, the woman's breast is a classic sex object that also can function as an objet a: for the "tit man," in love-making a breast will inevitably end up in his mouth (except if, of course, it belongs to Dolly). Now, unless one is truly perverse, the point of sucking a breast not to get or possess it (e.g., by literally eating it), but precisely the opposite: one sucks and licks and teases the breast to pleasure one's partner and stimulate one's own desire for the something more in the breast than the breast. Becoming sexually aroused by the sight or touch of a woman's breast has to do with what the breasts are not. Significantly, Copjec explains that desire is kept in play precisely because the objet a is unattainable, "the Other retains what it does not have and does not surrender it to the subject."42 Love is thus not only the supplement to an impossible or failed relationship, but it also denotes the demand and/or desire for recognition from another though the production of the objet a. Love is fundamentally deceptive because it is a kind of open promise to desiring: in courtship, a lover presents him or herself as an agent of recognition, as the promise of something more.
The significance of Lacan's understanding of love is that it is also a theory of persuasion: rhetors are like lovers, promising audiences a coming unity and stimulating their desire for that unity with various substitute objects: an end to their suffering and loneliness; a re-united union; better welfare reform, and so on.43 In rhetorical studies love's deception has been held-out as the promise of the "ideal speech situation"---a situation in which arguers meet as equals in a space of mutual recognition. (write here about Brockreide, then Corder). What ties these theories together is, of course, the stupidity of identification as the recognition of commonality or "consubstantiality," as Kennenth Burke coined. In fact, other than Aristotle's enthymeme (a tacit theory of identification), one is hard-pressed to identify a concept more ubiquitous in contemporary rhetorical theory than Burke's understanding of identification, an understanding that is arguably none other than the promise of love.
According to Burke, blah blah blah . . .
End of this section: detail Oliver's point about subject/object distinction. Say that this is the ultimate promise/push of rhetoric's many loves, and the basis upon which Griffin and Foss make their critique. This will make for a nice transition to the next section.
II. Them Two, or, Love is Shit
I give myself to you, the patient says again, but this gift of my person---as they say-Oh mystery! is changed inexplicably into a gift of shit---a term that is also essential to our experience.
--Jacques Lacan[44]
Notes
2 "'Islands Honored as Top BMI Song; WB Leads Pubbers." Variety 315 (20 June 1984): 57. 3 For examples of the sentiment, see Roy Kasten, "Blond Ambition: That Titanic Contradiction Dolly Parton is a Whore, a Saint, a Poet and a Preacher Disguised as a Dumb Blonde Country Girl" Riverfront Times (21 August 2002): n.p.; and John Nova Lomax, "The Dirty Thirty; The Worset Songs of All Time From Texas." Houston Press 16 (29 April 2004): n.p. The contemporary reaction is doubly ironic, for as I argue below, the song is regarded as kitsch precisely because hearers secretly identify with its Platonic concept of love as spiritual unity; see Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, With Continual Reference to Socrates, edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989): 50-52. 4 See Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 89. 5 Perhaps the most famous theory of the love of interrogation is that of Jean-Paul Sartre, who characterized love as a strategy to undermine the Other by knowing him or her thoroughly, both "biblically" and intellectually. See Jean-Paul Satre, Being and Nothingness, trans. ( ): . For an excellent overview of theories of love from the ancient Greeks to present day thinkers, see The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991). 6 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995. 7 John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 37. 8 Peters, Speaking, 37. 9 See, for example, . 10 Wayne Brockriede. "Arguers as Lovers." Philosophy and Rhetoric 5 (1972): 1-11 11 Jim W. Corder, "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love." Rhetoric Review 4 (1985): 16-32. 12Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, "Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric." Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 2-___. 13 bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William and Morrow, 2000); bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love (Harper Paperbacks, 2002); bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love (Harper Perennial, 2001); 14 Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), esp. 217-224 15Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 351. Also see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Nicholas Brown, Imre Szeman, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, "'Subterranean Passages of Thought': Empire's Inserts." Cultural Studies 18 (2002): 193-212. 16 Also see Luce Irigaray, I Love to You (New York: Routledge, 1995); Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhácek (New York: Continuum, 2002); Heidi Bostic, "Luce Irigaray and Love." Cultural Studies 16 (2002): 603.-610; Judith Hamera, "I Dance to You: Reflections on Irigaray's I Love to You in Pilates and Virtuosity." Cultural Studies 15 (2001): 229-240; Della Pollock, "Editor's Note on Performing Love." Cultural Studies 15 (2001): 203-205. 17 See Jay VerLinden. 2000. "Arguers as Harassers." Paper read at the 86th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 9-11 November, Seattle, Washington; available http://sorrel.humboldt.edu/~jgv1/ME/harassers.html accessed 9 January 2007. For recent work that touches, however indirectly, on the relation between love and rhetoric, see Jeremy Engels," Disciplining Jefferson: The Man Within the Breast and the Rhetorical Norms of Producing Order." Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9 (2006): 411-435; Eugene Garver, "The Rhetoric of Friendship in Plato's Lysis." Rhetorica 24 (2006): 127-146; and Dave Tell, "Beyond Mnemotechnics: Confession and Memory in Augustine." Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 233-253. 18 Dana Cloud. 2004. "Not Invited: Struggle and Social Change." Paper read at the 90th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 11-14 November, Chicago, Illinois; Nina M. Reich. 2004. "Invite This! Power, Material Oppresssion, and Social Change." Paper read at the 90th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 11-14 November, Chicago, Illinois; Nina M. Reich. 2004; and Julia T. Wood. 2004. "The Personal is Still Political: Feminism's Commitment to Structural Change." Paper read at the 90th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 11-14 November, Chicago, Illinois; Nina M. Reich. 2004. 19 "When the talk turns to love," argues Elizabeth Ervin, "things immediately move out of the realm of reasonable consieration and into sentimental soft focus or visceral cynicism . . . . I'll admit, the first time I read [Jim Corder's] essay 'Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love' I largely dismissed it as too touchy-feely." Elizabeth Ervin, "Love Composes Us (In Memory of Jim Corder)," Rhetoric Review 17 (1999): 322-323. 20 Or as Milan Kundera eloquently puts it, "kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence." The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (New York: HarperCollins/Perennial Classics, 1999), p. 248. Also see Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "kitsch." 21 Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 32; hereafter cited XX. 22 Lacan, XX. 23 Lacan, XX, 17. 24 Ronell, Stupidity, 89. 25 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 103. 26 In Evans, An Introductory, 103. 27 See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essay in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. 3-19; 102-141; and Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). 28 Lacan, XX, 12. 29 Lacan, XX, 86. 30 I mean "supplement" in the Derridian sense fetched from Rousseau; see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 141-164. 31 The term "disjunction," however, is Badiou's. My reading of Lacan on love is informed by Badiou. See "What is Love?" Sic 3: Sexuation, edited by Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 263-281. 32 Lacan, XX, 45. 33 Badiou, "What is Love?" 266. 34 See Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 289-290. 35 Badiou, "What is Love?" 266-267. 36 Badiou, "What is Love?" 267. Badiou's answer to the angel is to posit "humanity is one" in pursuit of the possibility of "transpositional knowledge"--the knowledge made possible by love. 37 It is possible for some to conclude that my extension of the heterosexual binary to "people in general" is a heteronormative move. What Lacan would stress, however, is that all difference (e.g., race) is based on this fundamental binary; it is only the Symbolic differentiation of "male" and "female" that we first learn of difference. Consequently, Lacan's remarks on love still apply to same sex difference: the yearning for the One, though established in a binary disjunction, begins with a fundamental distinction between one and then another. For a discussion of a similar pickle, see Heidi B_____ (article on Irigaray). 38 Lacan, XX, 45. 39 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 268. 40 Lacan, XI, 268. To this phrase Lacan adds, "I mutilate you," which I have excised for simplicity. The idea here is that in loving that quality or element "in you more than you," in a sense your person, body, and so on become mere objects for me to get at this "something more." In loving, then, I disfigure my love to resemble something she is not; I mutilate him. 41 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), 148. 42 Copject, Read My Desire, 148. 43 For a more detailed explanation of this argument, see Joshua Gunn, "Hystericizing Huey: Emotional Appeals, Desire, and the Psychodynamics of Demagoguery." Western Journal of Communication 71 (2007): 1-27. 44 Lacan, XI, 268. 45 Lacan, XX, 6. 46 Corder, "Argument," 27.