Tu m'aime or tu m'aime, continued
Think of how unreadable the lover is, even when response is well amplified.
Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People
Lauren Berlant’s latest and final novel, published posthumously after their tragic death in 2021, begins its meditation on inconvenience with an essay called “Sex in the Event of Happiness.” The essay deals primarily with the ways sex as event or episode disrupts self-conceptions of sovereignty, demanding we relinquish control, possibly have a bad or forgettable time, and engage intimately with another person in ways we may simultaneously desire and need but hate and resent. Sometimes we cannot even bear them.
A critical point Berlant makes early on in the essay is the incoherence of sexual dynamics: “at once intimate and impersonal, both intense and passing by.” Someone said to me recently that sex is the most physically intimate thing you can do with another person. I’m not sure I agree with the absolutism of the sentiment, but it’s worth noting that even in the most casual of instances, sex is an extremely intimate endeavor. But it’s also sometimes (often?) banal and ordinary, or at least fine and forgettable (“Most brushes with the intimate other remain story free.”)
The dichotomies encompassed within sex are certainly related to the slipperiness of how we can or do deploy language to express love. So much of being in love or being in intimacy with someone has to do with our constantly shifting our orientation to it, and the ways the orientation towards it threatens always to become it. We may desperately want our connection with a person to be “special” (a fantasy that carries with it all kinds of linguistic slippages and blurred signifiers). And it very well may be. But the performance of love and romance will always be a re-expression or rehearsal. The repeatability of love can then feel like a violation of some sacred pact between lovers. Take, for example, Olivia Rodrigo’s song deja vu:
So when you gonna tell her
That we did that, too?
She thinks it's special
But it's all reused
That was our place, I found it first
I made the jokes you tell to her when she's with you
Over the course of the song Rodrigo famously and fantastically claims things like Billy Joel and strawberry ice-cream as resolutely hers and his. Said partner’s sharing of these two (massively popular) cultural relics with his new partner become a violation of their originary intimacy pact. It sounds insane, but that’s what makes it perfect for foregrounding the challenge in front of us. Romance is repeatable and repeated. Often. Always. Yet: “The lovers’ wager is that freedom will be meaningful only if it is wrested from the genealogies of biography and identity, and therefore from inheritance and its logics of reproduction. Each lover wants to be known in a way, but only in a way.” Put another way, this “freedom” love begets threatens value loss so long as it exists in the context of having been done before, and the certainty of it being done again, in precisely this way or at least some semblance of it.
Interestingly, Berlant’s essay analyzes a film set in Paris, Last Tango in Paris, which feels like an apt moment to turn back towards my musing on “Je t’aime” as a profession of... something. Berlant argues that the two protagonists of the film Last Tango in Paris use sex as a way of world-making, where the form of the film functions to establish “affective realism about the difficult work of staying in relation without a conventionally cushioning concept or object” (like love, for example). The protagonists engage in an experimental way of fucking, or love making, or being intimate, which is mainly preoccupied with not using normative structuring of romance to make sense of whatever they are doing. “They do not want to fail,” writes Berlant, “yet no language exists for what else they want” (65).
If no language exists for what we want from love, what are we to do? Do we say nothing? Or do we grip desperately at the words that exist, stumble around explanations and justifications and theorizations that gesture to what’s possible without ever really capturing the ephemerality and temporality that is ????sexual intimacy??? love???? Whatever word you want to put in but you know exactly what I’m talking about????
The “lover” as ideology provides an interesting thought-experiment for this way of intimating with someone in ways that supercede classical and normative ways of being in relation. A lover is usually someone we sleep with. It connotes a level of privacy, of inner-worldliness, in describing a relationship. It is a relation that is turned inwards, two people towards one another, without making bold claims about monogamy, exclusivity, or longevity. It contains the word love, yet escapes the gravity of the concept of “love” as it stands on its own.
The word “lover” might feel antiquated or theatrical were we to use it colloquially. Which may why we mostly opt instead for wordy monographs about casual dating. Never mind that “casual” contains in itself a whole slew of contradictions made more potent when juxtaposed with the word “dating,” containing implications about formality and organization. To go on a date is to organize a date, or to be organized into one at the least. Organization already counters the notion of casualness, demanding thinking and planning and paying, investment. What is it to be casually dating? Does casual dating foreclose the possibility of feeling? Does it denote a specific time or place that is appropriate for a “date,” that makes it casual? If the dating isn’t so much about the dates, is it then just casually fucking? If there’s feeling, does that make it not casual anymore? If it’s not casual, is it serious? If dating is casual but sex is intimate, where does that leave us? Can intimacy be casual (would that mean the same as it being banal or occasionally forgettable?)? Or does sexual intimacy foreclose casualness (is there anything casual about licking a stranger’s butthole?)?
Je t’aime bien is a more explicitly romantic way of saying Je t’aime, but remains suspended in the incoherence and imprecision of our originary phrase. I wish that we had (in english) language that, rather than trying to make sense of love, made it make less sense and consequently normalized its inherent incoherence. A way of throwing our hands up and expressing how we feel about having thrown our hands up. A way of expressing love for another person that didn’t demand throwing caution to the wind in a passionate confessional nor being dishonest or austere about a strong feeling.
In some ways, the instability of “love” makes me wonder at the utility of language at all; certainly it makes me curious about the inadequacies of language to describe feeling, but especially these feelings. They make me wonder at the ways language makes a relation less legible by “cushioning” it while also pinning it down, changing it with each attempt to describe it. It makes me want to say nothing at all. It makes me want to make no sense. It makes me want to say nothing that tries to make sense of anything.
Maybe we must try, at some point, to say something or to make sense. The other critical marker of “love,” of sex, besides incoherence, is its ephemerality. “Love” never stops moving and if we don’t make sense of us it may consume us or leave us behind, either one when it’s already too late. Which is not to suggest there aren’t alternative modes of being in relation with one another, that don’t track with normative ideals and dreams about Love and Romance. It’s just to say that at some point, we have to do some work. And to use love or romance or sex as world-making, we have to do a lot of work, in fact.
If no language exists, we do our best. Sometimes we fail. We use a word one way and someone hears it another way. They can’t unhear it, or they can. We find ourselves suspended in incoherence for hours, and just when we think we’ve found the words that might offer some clarity, we forget what the question even was to begin with.