love as emancipation

    My first exciting memory my freshman year of college came with a concert that I attended towards the beginning of the year. Dead Prez, an underground hip-hop duo that raps about black nationalism and Marxism, gave an excellent performance at the Red Seven venue last year. Their lyrics are extreme – they frequently describe killing police officers as an adequate resistance to state surveillance, disown family members who have joined the military, and are immediately distrustful of any ‘cracker’ that holds public office. However, I will never forget being surprised by the end of the concert when stic.man set aside the blunts and genuinely spoke to the small audience. They left us with a quotation from Che Guevara: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” This claim has become increasingly important to me as the semester has progressed.

dead prez

    When encountering the passage about love in Handmaid’s Tale, a previous Self would have certainly scoffed. Utilizing an abstract and universalizing concept to “understand yourself” seems extremely dangerous (237). In a world where Halmark greeting cards and awkward romantic comedies commodify our understandings of social interactions, it is difficult to envision any genuine agency in a concept like love. Taking the example given by Atwood, while it is possible to emancipate one’s self from religious dogma in love by reversing the phrase “God is love,” it is impossible to not make heterosexism, racism, commodification, or any other phenomena a new God that permeates our social relations and eliminates authenticity in love (237). Recall Bump’s claim last Thursday that language has an alienating function in our attempts to communicate emotions. Surely language is influenced by outside social norms in a way that corrupts any genuine encounter with love.

    Even more dangerous is the stigma surrounding love. In Offred’s affair with the Commander, there is a strange treatment of the relationship. Comparisons are drawn with Luke – as if the authenticity of one previous love makes a latter one inauthentic. Offred is very conscious of the alienating nature of language – they refuse to say the word ‘love’ out of a fear that they “would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck” (282). In doing so, Offred is creating a static category of love that is self-alienating. Although admittedly her relationship with the Commander has many problematic elements to it that prevent it from being love, it is dangerous to deny the radical potentiality of any relationship.

    Taking these claims into account, how can love be revolutionary? Ultimately the revolutionary potential of love is only something that can be reconciled when acknowledging the positive nature of its universality. Although it, like any other ideological concept, can be seized and manipulated, it is still universally understood in some form. Between our exercises in empathizing with the Other, discussing the meaning of agape, and grappling with questions of our ethical relationships with other human beings and animals, it is clear that there is still the potential for genuine relationships between beings to pierce through ideological mystifications. I began the year denying the existence of an authentic relationship between humans termed love. When I think about it, that hasn't changed. Rather, my frame of reference has been impacted -- it is not the authenticity of love that makes it impactful, but rather the subjective point of view that the emotion arises from. It is the ability for a concept to be an aggregation of widely diverse standpoints and experiences while still retaining scope and emotion. Love is not merely a relationship between individuals, but it is also a hermeneutic necessary to transcend the hegemonic social forces that lack it.