We’re Not Fucking Around
The editors
Romance arrives as a flash of conviction. As a narrative structure, it insists on the future—its formal promise. Whether it's with a new lover hoping to break the trenchant repetition of bad patterns, in emotional growth born of the analytic couple, or inside the tremulous energy of an insurgent crowd that makes yesterday seem historically distinct from tomorrow, romance threads time with the texture of meaning. Perhaps delusional, perhaps heroic in this audacious promise, romance must also always be a fantasy, an imagined structure that has not yet lit the match. As such, it can only disappoint. Still, it is absolutely vital to our attachment to the world and each other, though it also provides the fuel for self-serving denial and disavowal.
Romanticize your life: a trending tagline for bleak times. This demand can easily slip from a call to inject life with meaning and pleasure (and resist the pull of doomerist anhedonia) to yet another retail-friendly slogan urging us to consume even more landfill-bound shit so as to momentarily enjoy forgetting the world at the world’s expense. Add to cart: rose-tinted glasses. Free overnight shipping.
And no wonder we might want to wear them, sleep in them, and fast. At a time when fascism moves to eradicate difference, offering an ideal body while moving to round up the rest, capitalism has co-opted even the most radical ways of configuring our romances. Our forms of attachment have multiplied and adapted, rushing to stay ahead of the powers snatching and grabbing our love and selling it back at a cost. We laugh at the neologisms and compound nouns as we earnestly explore their terms. Yet, when squeezed for meaning, little comes out. The fruit is rind all the way down, a romance of romance, form eating itself for content. Reduced to branded and brandished labels and to that gauchely euphemized word—lifestyle—we’re greeted daily with the Zodiac of contemporary romance and its vacuous aestheticization: open, closed, poly, trad; divorced, situationship, uncoupled, companionate; love-bombed, gaslit, co-dependent, trauma-bonded.
It is a particularly unlovely time to be thinking about romance. The heart can be fickle, indulgent, its matters distracting, impractical. But in the heavy boots of our undesirable present, seized by colliding catastrophes, we ask: how do we get out of here? Can the simple math of desire plus futurity break us free? Or is this just a barely veiled expression of our longing for avoidance? For a therapeutically approved prescription of ignorance as self-care regimen? These are acute questions, addressed to the standstill produced by the gutting transvaluation of nihilistic times in which we’re told occupation is freedom and genocide is safety. We can barely retain the capacity to think, let alone love. With truth and value dizzyingly reshuffled, the reliability of meaning itself is undermined. These are also the questions that compel us forward. Without seducing us through self-soothing, escape, art, analysis, and resistance attempt to answer the unimaginable present by way of performing possibility. Winnicott said it best: this is the task of play. We must keep proving that this reality isn’t static. In short: yes. We can move on, get out, change course.
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Long before the family romance or transference-love, the first story Freud tells about love is of the love we have for ourselves. No wonder our romantic attachments seem disjunct with the collective project of revolution. In the hazy bliss of primary narcissism, the world, a continuous extension of the self, imposes no boundaries. All the world’s love is wrapped up in and for the self. But this romance breaks with genre conventions; it is designed to falter and fail. Inevitably, an other will turn her back on us, even if momentarily, and disappoint. Inevitably, her gaze and her words will one day convey that we, too, disappoint. It hurts. As the world breaks away from the self, its shattered edges cut into the ego, marking us with a lasting wound. In the wake of this traumatic severance, we must relearn what it means to love ourselves. We must learn from scratch what it means to love others and our shared world. And we must also accept that no relationship, no matter how fulfilling and harmonious, can reincarnate narcissism’s perfect bubble. Freud warns: “[A] person in love is humble. A person who loves has, so to speak, forfeited a part of his narcissism, and it can only be replaced by his being loved.” In loving you, I have less for myself. This is often a worthy trade, but it also invites the ambivalence that will haunt love unhappily ever after.
Love does not arrive alone. When we declare that love is the answer, we often forget this formative ambivalence. Psychoanalysis warns that no relations are free from this dance of antagonism. Winnicott chimes in: “While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.” Love cannot elide economy, libidinal and otherwise. One is constitutive of the other, and vice versa. Love is neither the antidote to aggression nor the basis of a coherent social order because it emerges in tandem with hate. One polarity never abolishes the other. Yet these opposing forces are not caught in a stalemate; they propel us forward together into the future. Antagonism entwines them and defines us. It defines romance, which calls both for the familiar solace of deep-seated intimacies and for a stranger’s intoxicating eroticism. These romances and their singular pleasures are at odds. None emerges victorious.
Psychoanalysis has also taught us that our attachments are not spontaneous; they do not bear the signature of a fully liberated libido. Freud called the beloved the “object refound,” making love tragic, fated, foretold, returning us to these early scenes and familiar romances again and again. And sexuality, he cautioned, is always in conflict with society, its morals and mores. As Freud stressed, there is no such thing as individual psychology, much like there’s no such thing as private sexuality, nor sex beyond the social. Even when you’re coming alone, there are at least two strangers in the room with you.
And yet, despite a hundred and thirty years of this science of sexuality, sex itself has fled the scene of analysis. This makes for a particularly “excellent psychoanalytic joke,” as Alenka Zupančič quips. She underscores the hilarious, disturbing irony that though the “one and only rule or imperative involved in psychoanalytic treatment” is “to say absolutely anything that comes to mind,” contemporary psychoanalysts often view sex as not only beyond their clinical purview—the unconscious!—but as an indecorous topic for the consulting room. Psychoanalysis abandoned its investment in sexuality for one in trauma, even if Freud would never have dreamed of thinking the two apart. Having ceded sex to sexology and sex therapy, psychoanalysts now offer but one answer to our sexual complaints: refer out. It is as if Lacan, describing what happens in the analytic frame, was an oracle: “For the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you.” The moment has gone on a long time—some might say, long enough.
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Under pressure, perhaps, romance has gone into hiding, changed clothes, and reappeared undercover. You might ask: where is the romance in withdrawal from sexual partnership? Romance may now be better named as (co)dependency, that first form of love now pervasive, left to us to be renegotiated. Perhaps our attachments have become less obviously erotic, but also less romantic, if we think of romance as both a blow to the Enlightenment premium on reason—an affective surplus whose illogic displaces classical rationality—and also as the reinscription of its subject. This emotional excess is represented as the province of a single self, the psychic vagaries of an individual consciousness. In dependency, desire does not just exceed the limits of a normative object choice—heterosexuality, monogamy, and so on—but overwhelms the logic of a sufficient self. As it began, it once again becomes. The self is not enough.
In our increasingly repressive present, where recognition collapses into surveillance and the individual is powerless to advance toward the political horizon she yearns for, desire has shifted its sights, revising not only its object but its subject. So we continue to fall in love with comrades here and elsewhere, with ships, drawings issued from the hands that try to play it through, with signs of life. And love, specific and depersonalized, is, as Assata Shakur reminds us, the very contraband in the hell we are living in. They don’t want us to have it, and for good reason.
We know this to be true when we fall in love with the riot itself, and with everyone in the street or gathered at the square. Once day re-breaks, some can’t quite latch to the demands of ordinary struggle. When the inflection point yields to tedious group texts, meetings burdened by procedure, some excuse themselves, ghost the scene. But buzzkill is not the only threat to the romance of revolution. The foreclosure of a future can also stop its constitutive momentum, perishing the rose on the vine.
When we say that the youth are not fucking and that they don’t care about politics, these separate charges obscure the nature of their common cause. As the world attempts to disavow the death of the earth and the removal of its peoples, our sense of continuity flees; the receding horizon is not an open road, but a vanishing point. Whither romance in this equation? How foolish to fantasize and attach when we know the earth will ignore our needs, destroy us, even if it’s we, a we made of selves that are not enough, who ensured it would do so.