What is Love?

According to the French philosopher Lacan, so many people now don't know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure, love, is not a contract between two narcissists, it's more than that. It's a construction that compels the participants to go beyond narcissism. In order that love lasts one has to reinvent oneself.

What we talk about when we talk about this kind of love. Not just mere perishable personal romantic love, but also the kind of numinous transfigured, impersonal universal love that embraces us all, survives like a holy ghost, survives like smoke from a High-Church censer, ascending to heaven from the mortal bodies it inspirited.

Immortality of any kind—even the precarious “survival” —is not offered by love.

Which does not denigrate, even may elevate love. Love for its own sake, love that can perish and die, love not for some promise of immortality. This is tragic, romantic, and existentialist love, perishable with our death or the death of our love, but nonetheless, even more valued, because of its transience.

We must love one another even though we will die, and it will not make a difference—Its burning existence and extinction in the moment is all that counts. What happens to the love between two people when it’s over?

Seriously, where does it go, all that feeling, all those memories—do they dissolve into the air or do they survive somewhere, in some way—perhaps in a parallel universe? This is the poetic question we all must ask.