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Monday, August 20, 2012

To Love Truly Is To Want The Other Free

LOCKS representing true love forever on Paris bridges


At the heart of love à la française lies the idea of 

freedom. To love truly is to want the other free, and this 

includes the freedom to walk away. Love is not about 

possession or property. Love is no prison where two 

people are each other’s slaves. Love is not a commodity, 

either. Love is not capitalist, it is revolutionary. If 

anything, true love shows you the way to selflessness.




So please tell me where is the grey, boring, monotonous 

thought of "cheating" coming from?

The French Know

 Yet, instead of sharing the naïve joy of the world’s 
Romeos and Juliets, some Parisians have felt 
increasingly irritated. Walking on those bridges 
has become almost insufferable for them. The pain 
doesn’t come only from the fact that some bridges, 
like Pont de l’Archevêché and Pont des Arts, now 
feel as if they could collapse under the weight of 
tourists’ undying love but also from the idea 
that a lock could represent love. Such an 
idea is abhorrent to many French people.
“The fools! They haven’t understood a thing about love, have they?” 
.......Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir famously never married and 
never lived together and, although a couple in the absolute sense of the term, 
they had lasting and meaningful relationships with strings of brilliant minds 
and pretty faces. They deemed jealousy bourgeois and 
banal.

In his recent book, “In Praise of Love,” the French 
philosopher Alain Badiou 
reminds us that love implies 
constant risk. There is no safe, 
everlasting love. The idea 
that you can lock two people’s 
love once and for all, and toss 
the key, is a puerile fantasy. 
For Mr. Badiou, love is 
inherently hazardous, always 
on the brink of failure and 
above all vulnerable. Embrace its fragility, wish your 
beloved 
to be free and you might just, only just, have a chance to 
retain his or her undying gratitude, and love. But don’t 
ever 
dream of locks and throwing keys overboard, 

especially not 



in Paris.
DeLillo's Elise in Cosmopolis:


No he (Cronenberg) didn't keep the relationship between Elise and Packer the same as in the book:

What is money to a poet, she says, love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Without Elise there's no love of the world. No Elise makes the movie as detached as Eric is in it. Cosmopolis the book is a verse. Cosmopolis the movie is not, it's a movie.

Instead of words from the book, Cronenberg says he gives an actor's face.
This post is for Elise's face missing in the movie when Eric realizes he loves her and she slips away.


For Elise, the face of love. The kind of love which sprungs out mysteriously in unexpected places; which enables, is not selfish, makes one do foolish things and wear turbans, which supports and understands without asking, which gives and makes one free to be a gull at dawn, anything and everything one can be. Which makes one an overman. Even if everything and anything one is, is dead in the end. Precisely because that which one ultimately is in the end is dead .



Amor fati, nothing altered, nothing alterable.

Cronenberg thought this part was a fantasy because Cronenberg thinks love is a fantasy.

“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.” - Judith Butler

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes (and I have quoted this many times), “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love.”
In Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes writes (he is speaking of emotional intelligence), “…intelligence is everything that permits us to live superlatively with another person.”
This is where knowing how to treat someone well and wanting to treat someone well converge.
From Masha Tupitsyn: 

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Be kind to each other even when you disagree.