Question: Whether a fruit tree can love a human being?

Objection 1: It would seem that a fruit tree cannot love a human being. As Socrates argues in the Symposium, love fundamentally exists only in subjects conscious of their lack of something: “to love that which is not yet at hand for him and what he does not have yet” (200d). Further, while a vulgar love or drive “to beget” through procreative acts may exist even in the beasts, it is unclear if this drive can be said to exist in the fruit tree. If it did, it seems unlikely that this drive to procreate would be directed by fruit trees towards human beings. Moreover, love cannot be properly said to exist in this drive to procreate, but love is rather a “ladder” subjects can climb to the experience of Beauty Itself. Even if fruit trees direct a procreative drive towards human beings, this cannot fully be considered love as the ascent to Beauty.

Objection 2: Further, love it seems love requires an element of falling that maintains the chanciness of the encounter. “Habit is the worst thing that can happen to love,” Horvat argues (The Radicality of Love, 7). While caring or symbiotic relationships may exist between fruit trees and humans, they are based on regular use, attentiveness, and habit—in short cultivation. Therefore, these relationships lack a necessary element of love.

Objection 3: Further it seems love only exists between similar things or at the very least to bring about similarity and union. In the Symposium, Aristophanes held that love is the realization of our “ancient nature” of unity (188c) and in the Gospel of John, Jesus prays that human beings may all be one just as he is one in love with the Father (John 17:21). But the fruit tree and human are distinct species and it is impossible to imagine their union.

Objection 4: Further as Derrida points out, “the key to love is the acceptance of necessary possibility of mourning the other,” or the redefinition of experience in terms of alterity (in Protevi, “Love” 2003: 185). Yet, it is not clear if fruit trees can experience mourning (see Objection 1). More problematically, even if we assume trees can experience alterity, it is impossible to prove that they are able to grasp the aporetic situation that this experience produces.

On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari argue that love should “be like the wasp and the orchid” (ATP 27).

I answer that, love cannot be reduced to single theory or account; “love is not a common concept, is not something one can extricate and contemplate at a distance” (Nancy, “Shattered Love” 246). If we can say love at all, what we must mean by it is that love is abandonment to the concrete infinite abundance of all possible loves: the love between spouses, friends, comrades, parent and child, “emotion and pornography, the neighbor and the infant, the love of lovers and the love of God, fraternal love and the love of art,” or “the very process of creating novel uses of available materials.” Love de-subjectifies, it pilfers and drains the subject of desire, opening up the body to new movements and new connections. Love is the alienating of subject from body, the alienation of all attempts to sum up love. “Love is the call to install inclusive disjunctions so that the roads not taken are still accessible” (Protevi 2003: 184). Consequently, I say that love is not something that belongs to the subject or raises the object to subjectivity, but precisely what shatters the subject, charting its excesses and allowing for something new to emerge, escape, or overcome. In this sense we can say that the fruit tree can and does love particular human beings, both seducing human beings into ever new grafting relationship and pursuing new connections that neither the human body nor tree can grasp at the beginning. Only when we think about the relationship of love as one between subjects or a higher from of desiring bodies (desire purified by subjective reflection) aimed at satisfying bonding and procreative urges—the urges of organisms—does love become either inaccessible to the non-subject fruit tree or reducible to all desire.

Reply to Objection 1: As I have said, love is a de-subjectifying movement; a “shattering” or “exposing” in contrast to a dia-logue in Jean-Luc Nancy’s language. Socrates’ attempt to look for love at the subjective level is thus fundamentally misplaced. While Socrates seems to hit upon something in his connection of love and lack, he confuses the causality. Love is not a subject’s desire for something s/he lacks, but the pilfering and exposing of the subject, desire’s draining. Love drains the subject of satisfaction, undoing the subject, exposing an always vulnerable [woundable] body enmeshed in active, ongoing material connections of making and composing. It is precisely this draining force of love we as subjects have attempted to domesticate through a series of makings-safe that inverts love and desire, confusing desire with the appetitive body and the love with the higher faculties.

Reply to Objection 2: This is to confuse love with the subject’s experience of love. Yet love must be said in two ways: subjective love and bodily love. Habit is profoundly detrimental to subjective love transforming the relationship between subjects into an object and ultimately a means for procuring the safe and regular fulfillment of an organism’s bonding and mating urges. At the level of bodies however, sex and procreation never enter the scene, these being the concerns of bonding and procreating subject-organisms. Something like habit or endurance does not pose the same threat to bodily love as it poses to subjective love. Indeed, something like endurance in bodily love may even be needful because the subject which bodily love pilfers, if only for a second, is always trying to re-assert its dominance.

Reply to Objection 3: As Hardt and Negri say, love is “the experimentation of singularities in the common which in turn produce a new common and new singularities” (Commonwealth 183). The identitarian love and love of unification that Aristophanes and John’s Jesus seem to give account to here are not so much poor descriptions of love (objection 1) nor aspects of subjective love (objection 2), but corruptions of bodily love, of love’s superabundant productivity through forcing love to constantly repeat the same.

Reply to Objection 4: The very danger of the aporetic experience of love is its stagnation or self-satisfaction in its own definition, which prevents the movement from this experience to experimentation: “that which one does in order to provoke a novel occurrence, to elicit a new event, to produce a new body” (Protevi 183). Experience without experiment is a short-circuiting of love (French: <<expérience>>). While it may be necessary for human-like subjects like us to move from the experience to the experiment—and in that order—this is a movement that is not essential to love. Perhaps higher bodies like fruit trees can avoid this first and often paralyzing step.

~ a loving homage to St Thomas Aquinas composed by Zachery Reyna