Questions for Loving Encounters with the Non-Human

Can love produce truth? And if so, what truths can it produce in relationships between humans and non-humans?

Observers have occasionally explained love as a type of romantic fiction. According to the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, love is a form of learned “affectional bonding,” something that ultimately fills the void that follows the expiration of “limerence,” or the obsessional euphoria felt when an individual first falls for another. In one of his more cynical moments, Jacques Lacan once wrote that love compensated for the “lack” apparent in the sexual relationship. In this view, love becomes a purely theoretical explanation that sanitizes the practical reality of sexual relations. While sex may be a real physical encounter, love is only a fictional veneer that legitimizes it.

An alternative tradition, however, has argued that love is in fact the truly “real” process in the meeting of individuals, in relief to (or in excess of) the fundamental “emptiness” of sexual encounters. According to this logic, love is a means for producing truths that otherwise remain inaccessible. For a range of philosophers and theologians, love essentially becomes a pathway for opening up forms of experience that are “true” precisely insofar as they allow individuals to reach types of understanding (whether social or spiritual) that ordinarily lie beyond the grasp of a single individual.

One type of truth that love is said to produce is intersubjective. For the philosopher Alain Badiou, love is an enduring process that teaches individuals to expand their own singular experiences of the world. Essentially, Badiou sees love as an “event,” or a chance encounter that suddenly yet permanently transforms the structures of a life to the extent that all things that came before now seem to have led, teleologically, to the encounter. It is through this radical event of two lives merging together, Badiou says, that love produces a new truth about the nature of the self and the world. Sexual desire is a crucial component of this opening. “It is at the point of desire,” he writes, “that love fractures the One in order that the Two occur in supposition” (Conditions, 191). Effectively, erotic love is understood as a process that opens up the individual mind to the greater intersubjective truth of otherness.

Another type of truth associated with love is spiritual (or theological). Medieval theologians such as Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) argued that love was ultimately a way for the soul to learn to dissolve itself into the oneness of God. For Bernard, love was a mental spark that revealed the transcendent truth of being. Again, this kind of love originally took its cue from sexual urges. By producing an insatiable craving, Bernard said, love showed the soul that it was fundamentally incomplete. Eventually, the soul realized that “love of God is the only desire that can be truly quenched” (De Diligendo Deo, 25). After seeing that they were a constituent part of God, the individual then learned to embrace their material and even psychological nothingness, coming to find their true being in mystical ascent to the divine instead.

While Badiou and Bernard both see love as a pathway to transcendent truths, they disagree on the issue of number. Although for theologians such as Bernard, love is a process where the multitude of humanity comes to find their truth as a singular “one” in God, for Badiou love is a process whereby one person effectively becomes “two.” In Bernard’s view, all the singularities of being must eventually be annihilated (or subsumed) in the oneness of God. “As a drop of water seems to disappear completely in a big quantity of wine, even assuming the wine’s taste and color … so it is necessary for the saints that all human feelings melt in a mysterious way and flow into the will of God.” (De Diligendo Deo, 30) Yet, as Badiou objects, this kind of mystical view is “tantamount to an objection against being-for-death” (Conditions, 181). As he sees it, this kind of assertion of a “one” ultimately denies and suppresses the multiplicity of living beings by folding them into an absolute. By contrast, for Badiou, love is something that opens the individual’s awareness of multiple voices and modes of being.

This opens up a critical question for how we understand love between humans and objects. First, if sexual encounters are usually seen as the spur for even the most transcendent and intellectually oriented kinds of love, how can this be (ethically / realistically) incorporated into a love of non-humans? Does this necessitate an expansion of our definition of the sexual encounter, or a reduction of its typical physical manifestations? Secondly, if we are to enter into a genuinely loving relationship with non-humans, we must think about the relationship between the singular and the multiple. How far must we subsume our individuality (our own singular ways of seeing or knowing) in the process of loving non-humans? Is the love encounter (with a tree or a bird, or a machine or a river) a meeting in which the lover is shattered and absorbed, or given access to a previously inaccessible view of the world? Or is it a reciprocal process, through which both “lovers” come to find a new truth in the view of the other? Ultimately, how exclusive or situated is the loving encounter, and what kind of relationship does it open up between the lover, the beloved, and the multiple?

Ultimately, a question remains about the substantial nature of our loving encounters with the non-human. Is it a spiritual or an intersubjective relationship that we are attempting to build when we love a machine? Does it produce a new truth about the self or about the world? And if we want to love, and if we accept that love has the power to shatter us, then how can we think about what happens to the fragments of us (and the object of our love) that we leave behind? Do they remain shattered, or do they find new forms after the “event” of love?