Climbing its peak is not only meaningful for those who look at it.
About the author
Alain Badiou, a famous contemporary French philosopher and writer, and an honorary professor at Paris Normal University, is one of the most famous, concerned and controversial leftist thinkers in Europe and America. In his theoretical system, philosophy is to seek truth, and there are four ways to explore truth: mathematics, or science, poetry, that is, art, and politics, and the last one is love. Aiduoduo is a very important part of his philosophical system.
About this book
"Love duo" is a dialogue between Badio and reporters with the theme of "love". Badiou criticized the popular western concept of "love" and insisted on some idealism, which reflected his philosophy and his vision of a better ideal society. If the original title of this book is directly translated, it should actually be an ode to love, or a hymn to love. You should feel that this title directly expresses the author's attitude towards love. Although Badiou's interpretation is purely philosophical, after reading this book, you can still feel a person who has experienced love and has a deep understanding of love. These experiences run through the book and will definitely make you feel * * * even moved.
Core content
According to Badiou, the mainstream discourse of love today can be divided into four categories: romanticism, contractualism, skepticism and pragmatism. In his opinion, they are not talking about true love. So he felt that love was threatened. Badiou believes that love is the pursuit of truth. The truth that love leads us to is the truth about "two". Therefore, love has brought about drastic changes in survival. Love creates a world that only belongs to two people. When you become a lover, it means that you have to think about what "two" means instead of "one". Love is a persistent construction, and it is a persistent adventure. For individuals, the transition from probability to destiny brought by love is a very strong feeling, and it also brings a huge burden. You may even get stage fright. You don't know what forever means and how long it will last. However, once you give up at any time, love disappears. So the declaration of love "I love you" means "I love you forever". The extension of time itself is preset in the declaration of love, effectively locking the probability in the eternal framework.
order
Hello, welcome to "Listen to a book every day". The book I read to you in this issue is the Love Duet by the contemporary philosopher Alan Badiou. Love is one of the most common topics in our daily life. Pop songs are full of love, movies and TV plays are full of love, and stars and artists like to talk about love. If someone stands up and says that we have been bombarded by the "love duo" for a long time, it is hard to say that this person is wrong. So, what would the most famous philosopher say if he joined the chorus of love? In this audio, we will talk about this philosopher's understanding of love. In his view, love is the pursuit of truth, or love leads us to truth.
Let's start with the author Badio. He was born in 1937. He is over 80 years old and still alive. Moreover, new books keep coming out. He is one of the most famous philosophers in contemporary Europe, especially in France. In his theoretical system, philosophy is to seek truth. There are four ways to explore truth, namely science, art and politics, and the last one is love. Therefore, the love duo we want to interpret is a very important part of his philosophical system. In addition to this book, Badiou also wrote a paper on love, entitled "What is love". This paper is very academic, which contains many philosophical and psychoanalytic terms, as well as many charts and functions. The reader of this book, Mr. Wu Guanjun, used this paper as the designated reading material and discussed it in the doctoral class. As a result, several people were puzzled. During the discussion, a female doctoral student even said bitterly that if this article explains love, I would rather have no love for life than read this article about love again! Compared with what love is, Love Duo is much better, because it discusses love in the form of interviews, and there are far fewer terms in it.
The Multiple Singing of Love is the work of Badiou at the age of 7 1. When a person enters his twilight years, it should not be a whim to choose love as a topic. The original title of this book, if translated directly, should actually be an ode to love, or a compliment to love. You should feel that this title directly expresses the author's attitude towards love. Although Badiou's interpretation is purely philosophical, after reading this book, you can still feel a person who has experienced love and has a deep understanding of love. These experiences run through the book and will definitely make you feel * * * even moved.
Badiou talked about the topic of love because he felt that love was threatened. Now the mainstream discourse's interpretation of love, in his view, violates the essence of love. This is the first question we will talk about in this audio issue. In the second part, let's talk about Badio's own philosophical interpretation of love. What is the truth that love wants to go or seek? In the third part, let's see how love goes to reality.
first part
Ok, let's move on to the first content. As mentioned above, nowadays, love words are overwhelming, but in Badiou's view, most of them can be classified into the following four categories: romanticism; Contractualism; Skepticism and pragmatism. Badiou retorted one by one. In his opinion, they are not talking about true love. At first glance, these four words may make you a little embarrassed. In fact, you should be familiar with these four words of love. Let me talk about it separately.
Let's talk about romantic love first, which should be the most familiar and influential love vocabulary for the public. This kind of love is wonderful and happy. Especially we experienced the wonderful feeling when two people met for the first time. Literary works from ancient times to the present, from poetry to novels, are full of romantic love, and now the film and television works are everywhere. Today, when it comes to love, I'm afraid romantic love comes to mind first.
Secondly, it is contractual love, which thinks that love is a contract between two people. This understanding of love is also quite marketable. You must have heard someone advise you not to be carried away by romance. The initial heartbeat is often unreliable, and love can only form a stable relationship through contract. This understanding of love can also be said to be a variant of business logic, because it recognizes that the real foundation of love is the exchange of interests. For example, we will say "the right match", which has always been considered as the basis of lasting love. Nowadays, all kinds of dating websites are based on income level, having a house and a car as screening conditions.
The third is the love of skepticism. I don't know if you have heard the argument that nine times out of ten, love will not be a "positive result" and even bring pain. A high proportion of failures make many experiencers doubt love, think that love is unreliable, and even think that love is an illusion, a profound and illusory trick, just to ensure the continuation of species. A skeptical understanding of love actually means that love can only be sex, because sex is real and can be captured. The adaptation of Ang Lee's film Lust, Caution to Zhang Ailing's original work in 2007 is based on this understanding of love. In movies, you will find that for the protagonist, only the love repeatedly "confirmed" by the body is true and rational. Ang Lee said in an interview after the film was released: "In the film, Wang Jiazhi moved his true feelings in acting. This is color." Visible, for Ang Lee, "color" and "true feelings" are the same thing. It is based on this understanding that the film Lust, Caution gives a naked visual expression to sex in an extremely outstanding way. On the contrary, the description of sex in Zhang Ailing's original works is extremely rare, just passing by. It can be said that this skeptical view of love is actually more and more rampant today.
Finally, there is a pragmatic love. This view of love holds that the kind of love advocated by romanticism is a useless adventure. The most practical and effective thing is to establish a spouse relationship affectionately. On the basis of avoiding passion, arrange all aspects of love reasonably. This interpretation does not go to any extreme, such as emphasis or interest, but contains various factors. In our life, many people actually treat love with this practical attitude, that is, love is not so romantic, snobbish and lewd. Love is just a piece of life, even if it is a small piece, it is enough to deal with it economically and effectively.
We can see that although Romanticism seems to be the noisiest and most influential interpretation of love, contractualism, skepticism and pragmatism have no weaker influence on love than Romanticism. Badiou rejected all four mainstream explanations of love. In his view, none of these words of love touched on true love.
the second part
So, how does Badio understand love? Next, let's interpret the second content: Badiou himself put forward the fifth explanation of love, that is, love is the search for truth. You may ask, why can love seek truth? To understand this problem, we must first understand the truth that Badiou said. In his view, the truth that love leads us to is the truth about "two", which is one of the best.
You must have heard a fable about love from Plato's Drinking. According to the fable, the human body was originally a circle with two heads, four hands and four feet, but people angered God, so God split the circle into two and became two independent individuals. But separated people are looking for their other half. In Badiou's view, this fable is a familiar truth, that is, the truth of "one". "One" itself, to form a whole unit, two people should be close together, and close together is the purpose. The truth of "two" emphasizes that two people are still two independent individuals after being closed. This new circle is no longer the original unity, it includes two different and independent parts.
This is Badiou's understanding of love. Two independent people found each other and met love. After that, love brings you the same scene for two people, which is a new circle. This scene can only be entered when you meet love. Therefore, love brings about drastic changes in survival. Before you meet love, you are just yourself, and you are a "one" relative to "two". It is love that opens the passage from "one" to "two". In love, you exist with others. Love creates a world that only belongs to two people.
You can think about it, in love, are you two "suitable" but at the same time become another unique individual? You become a person in love. You are the subject of love and a lover in English. You can call it a lover. Why is this question important? Because for Badiou, lover is the same word as philosopher and thinker. Being a lover means you have to think about what "two" means instead of "one". Falling in love means that you have to get rid of the original state of life, and your experience of the world has completely changed. What changes have taken place? Badio said that when you meet love, you can realize that your experience of the world is limited. Our original experience of the world is self-contained and limited, but love, let us break through our own limitations and turn to the "two" experience. So "two" is the first opening of personal finiteness, and it is opened in the smallest but most radical way. Lovers create a new world after two people realize the difference, so in this new world, the truth about the difference is produced, which is the truth of "two" So Badiou said that love is a process leading to truth and a unique experience of constructing truth.
This unique experience is that you start to re-examine everything through the scene where you two are the same. You need special attention. This reexamination means not looking at each other, not just looking at each other. This is what we said in the first film, the love that Badio opposed. Love must look at the world from the perspective of "two scenes". So "I only have eyes for you" sung in popular songs is not love for Badio, because we still have to depend on each other. If you don't change to the perspective of "two", then now "you only have her in your eyes", and then there will be other objects in your eyes, and you will always be staring at it alone. Even if you love her in your eyes until you run out of life, it still doesn't mean you are in love. Many works of art are eulogizing the love that has exhausted a lifetime, calling it true love. In Badiou's eyes, this is still just "a scene". When you really look at it from the perspective of "two", you see not only her, but the whole world. Therefore, Badiou immediately emphasized that love is not a "relationship" between two individuals, but a process of truth, a re-creation of life, and a re-birth practice of the world.
It is in the sense of truth procedure that Badiou points out that love and politics are similar. Love is the truth of "two". Let's deal with our differences in a creative way. And politics is a "lot" truth, involving not only two people, but many people. Love is from one to two to infinity. Politics is from one to two, to many, to infinity. It is to let you switch to the perspective of difference and pursue equality creatively. Love allows us to transcend selfishness, narcissism and possession of things, but insist on * * *. People's * * * and life can combine all the differences. Who he/she is, where he/she was born, what language he/she speaks and what culture are not obstacles to creating love. This explains why in Badiou, love and politics are both processes of producing truth.
Badiou's view of love seems a bit idealistic. Therefore, it is easy to be refuted by the mainstream view of love mentioned above, especially those who are skeptical about love. Love sutra is often understood as sex. Today, many wise men are claiming that love does not exist, only desire exists. Love is just the decoration of sex, giving sexual desire a beautiful facade. In Badio's view, this is the most need to be vigilant. The worst consequence of this understanding is that love is deconstructed by sex. Love has become redundant and deceptive.
On the surface, this understanding of love is hard to overturn, because sex has physical and physiological evidence, it is related to the body, and love is only declared by language. It seems obvious which is true and which is false. However, Badio completely reversed this order. He thinks that "I love you" is the truth, and sexual desire is a scam. Here, Badiou inherited the insight of psychoanalysis, and proposed that the fundamental difference between love and desire is that desire only sees part of the object, such as chest and buttocks, while love focuses on the whole object. Isn't it? When a boy only notices the other person's chest, buttocks, thighs and even the other person's face, does he fall in love with that girl?
More importantly, there is a key topic in this psychoanalytic research, that is, there is no such thing as sexual relationship. Sex doesn't make people couple, it only keeps people away from their partners. People in sexual activities only have sex with themselves through others, and another person is just a tool to get their own pleasure. Badiou further pointed out that the relationship between two people is established by love. In love, when you give your body to the other person, the "pleasure" at the physical level is only the effect created by love. Giving your body to the other person is actually giving yourself to love: physical communication becomes a physical expression of the declaration of love. All non-love sexual intercourse is completely narcissistic. And love, everything the other person has, has entered my life. My life was disrupted and reorganized. With love, sex life can really become a matter for two people.
Therefore, love can cover sex, but not the other way around. Sex is only 1+ 1, but it does not produce "two". Badiou emphasized that this is also the difference between love and friendship: love is interrelated in general. Friendship does not include physical contact and physical pleasure, but love does. Physical delivery is a physical symbol of love, not just physical evidence of sex. Every "sex" is an effort to let the other person enter the truth of "two" and to confirm the other person's re-invented life.
the third part
As I said before, love leads us to the truth of "two" Your world has changed, and you begin to look at everything from a "two" perspective. You may think it's simple to say, but love is so elusive and difficult to grasp. Even if we understand these truths, we will not love. Badiou summed up the method of love for us. He called this program the program of love, which contains two parts, both of which are indispensable. The first part is "event" and the second part is "time". Running through these two parts is "practice"-especially the declaration of love. The pronunciation of these three keywords is very close, and I will focus on distinguishing them for you in the specific narrative.
Let's talk about events first. The theme song of the classic Japanese drama "Tokyo Love Story" is familiar to friends after 1970s and 1980s, and it is called "Sudden Love". Love is an emergency. This event is full of contingency and unpredictability. No one can arrange to meet love in advance. However, this unpredictable thing gives all the meaning to the two lives that meet. Love, after two people's life trajectories intersect, mix and relate, becomes a * * * and a meaningful * * * for two people. Through the "two scenes", they constantly relive the world and feel the birth of a new world, including the birth of children. As an event, encounter is completely out of control. It's completely random, accidental and related to luck. Therefore, love is often understood as a miracle.
However, this is not the whole of love. As a procedure of truth, love must include efforts to tame contingency, which is what Badiou calls practice. You can understand the practice here like this. It is all the concrete things you do for love, including dating, proposing marriage, having children and so on. Otherwise, how can the original pure opportunity become the fulcrum of the truth of life? The power to pull love out of pure accident comes from this kind of practice. And the most fundamental way is to make a declaration of love. For Badiou, the declaration of love is simple, just three words: "I love you."
Interestingly, today, we have two completely opposite attitudes towards saying "I love you". First of all, some people think it is easy to say "I love you". They think that the sentence "I love you" is meaningless and just a cliche. Secondly, some people will find it difficult to say "I love you". They think that if I say "I love you", it is too difficult to let the other person know that I will give everything. So when we watch TV series, we will see that many people will try to avoid saying "I love you" and use various methods instead, that is, they will not let themselves say those three words. In Badio's view, this is unnecessary. The declaration of love is actually as simple as saying "I love you".
Why can this sentence have such a heavy weight and lead to the truth? Badiou said that this is because the language of love is similar to poetry. Even the simplest words, love or poetry, can inject almost unbearable density and strength into them. No matter how you express it, the declaration of love always means that you have to extract something eternal from your encounter by luck, that is, a promise and a loyalty. In other words, if we want to transition from events to truth, we must restrain the contingency at a certain moment and turn events into a sustainable process. This is the second key word of "The Truth of Love" program: time. Badiou called time endless and emphasized the continuity of the love process, especially in this continuous process, you need to keep practicing. Generally speaking, love is to grow old with you.
The practice of love, including the above-mentioned declaration, runs through the meeting events and a long time. Today, there are few words about love, especially romantic love, about duration. For example, love stories in movies all end with two people "together", and it seems that love will continue automatically. Interestingly, the story told directly after "Together" in the movie also doesn't talk about the persistence of love at all, and instead talks about mother-in-law, infidelity and palace fighting, which has nothing to do with love. Therefore, although everyone is talking about love today, at most, there is only the first half without the second half, but the miracle is not lasting, only the instantaneous glory without eternal light. In these stories, love is just an event rather than a fact.
In Badiou's view, what is important is the second half: the experience of the first half is uncontrollable, and the continuation of the second half is really related to our practice and is a part we can control. Badiou himself hates the saying that "instant is eternity": it seems that as long as there is a spark in an instant, you will experience love. He also put forward a tit-for-tat suggestion: when talking about love, we might as well talk less about miracles, pay more attention to those difficult parts, and pay attention to those persistent practices over time. It was here that Badiou introduced the concept of "loyalty". Loyalty is not just two people promise not to sleep with others, but to be loyal to the event of love, so that this event will not happen in vain and then disappear. In other words, loyalty is the practice of making events last and making love events have eternal attributes.
Therefore, Badiou's key argument is that the declaration of love is not one-off, not a pledge of eternal love at that time, and in the end it can only be "a moment that should last forever, and I came and went unconsciously." The declaration of love is long-term, scattered, even confused and tangled, which needs constant repetition and is destined to be repeated again and again. In other words, we should constantly express our love and let the other party confirm our love, whether we use the words "I love you" or not. In the course of two people's lives, there will be many "points", which let us return to the point where the event happened in different forms. At this point, we must make a new declaration of love, even in an urgent form. In other words, after the declaration of love turns the event into the truth, there will still be new events, such as pregnancy and the birth of a child, which will bring you back to that point and make a new declaration again.
Love is a persistent construction, and it is a persistent adventure. Lovers must be resilient, give up when they quarrel, and break up when they disagree. This is the shame of love. True love is a persistent and even painful victory that transcends obstacles. Love is not just two people living, but constantly recreating and meeting love. This accidental event stretches in time, allowing two people to meet by chance and finally become fate. Therefore, the love events that happened in our individual lives and the seemingly insignificant actions that followed bear universal significance in persistence and continuation. Although the first meeting is always accidental, once love lasts for a long time, it brings a brand-new experience to the world. In retrospect, it is almost inevitable. The lover's practice of love is to construct what seems inevitable from random events, that is, truth.
Therefore, Badiou said, love doesn't need any other special sacrifice ceremony, just need to repeat the declaration of love, beat the probability word by word, and beat the probability day by day. By creating something lasting, a world is really born. That is to say, in the experience of "two", the lover constructs the truth and eternity of love point by point in time. Badiou is emphasizing that what you do for love is more important than the miracle of love. Constantly thinking, acting, changing and creating, although heavy and endless, "happiness will be the intrinsic reward of all work."
This is the last part we want to talk about. In this part, we explain the process of love. The process of love is divided into two parts: love as an event and love that insists on time. It is a practice for lovers to constantly restate the declaration of love, which of course includes responsibility and loyalty. Events point to eternity in time, and contingency points to truth in continuity. The key to love-and the biggest problem-is to carve eternity in time.
Badiou admits that for individuals, the transition from probability to destiny is a very strong feeling, and it also brings a huge burden. You may even get stage fright. You don't know what forever means and how long it will last. However, once you give up at any time, love disappears. Badio said that ending love, especially unilaterally, is always a disaster, no matter what your reason is. The way to love is to eliminate the feeling that "life is like the first time": it is better to act than to sigh. "I love you" means "I love you forever" The extension of time itself is preset in the declaration of love, effectively locking the probability in the eternal framework.