On love and abandonment: a love letter

In James Baldwin’s masterfully written novel Another Country, one finds the following passage:

He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, for ever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

Baldwin creates a connection between love and mystery, between love and a withdrawal or abandonment of the known. The face of a stranger holds no secrets, and the face of a lover is an unknown, a mystery holding the possibility of torment. That is, the face that we know better (than that of the stranger) “is an unknown”. That would mean that we can define the face of a lover as the ‘known unknown’. No face, and perhaps no thing, is of itself ‘mysterious’. The strangers that are also waiting at the bus or sitting at the café are not mysterious, they contain no possibility of torment because there is no expectation, no ‘known’ from which they can deviate. The stranger simply does not exist in the same manner as the lover does; the stranger is not in the way the lover is.

The reason Baldwin can speak of such a paradoxical phenomenon, is because mystery is defined as something that is invested into something by the imagination. But what does this mean? How is mystery invested into something? And more specifically, how is it invested into something that, like the face of a lover, is becoming more and more familiar?

A similar dynamic is spotted by Max in his last text on Thought Magicians: “When we started Thought Magicians, I felt a slumbering fear that one day, I would run out of ideas. I was afraid that there would come a point in time in which I simply had nothing more to say, feverishly combing through my notebooks to try and find something new to write on. The strange thing is that the exact opposite has happened: the more I write, the more I find possible things to write about”. We could rephrase that as: the more I write, the more I answer questions and express the world in words, the more new questions arise, the more the world becomes mysterious and withdraws itself from understanding. Perhaps, then, there is a connection between love (as abandonment and mystery) and writing.

Before attempting to work on this question, let us reflect on the scope of this paradox. Normally, abandonment is associated with the opposite of love. And in a way rightly so. It is a terrible experience to be abandoned by a partner, parent or friend. But the harsh possibility of abandonment is most apparant in the realm of contemporary politics. Currently, a vast amount of articles and speeches, like the one given by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the most recent World Economic Forum, are speaking of the end, the abandonment of a time defined by the ‘rules-based order’ and international law. What is exactly meant by this remains vague, but it seems to imply that we are leaving a time in which people were protected by a system of values, laws and rights, like universal human rights, and that we are now entering a time defined by precarity and unconstrained political power. However, as I’ve already talked about in this text, the rule-based order was and is in actuality first and foremost defined by the structure of abandonment. As I am far from the first to point out, this order, which has been presented as defining modern democracies, was never more than an illusion for some. Something like universal human rights is, and has only been meaningful in light of its potential abandonment. They have never been able to protect anyone, and only functioned as something that could be pointed to after their violation. The monstrous events in Gaza have made this clear once more. Another example is the wave of violent acts of ICE agents in American cities. What is happening is in no way something new. In fact, what is happening is the expansion of the zones of exception that were already present in particular (often predominately black) neighborhoods, in which a state of abandonment of rights and exposure to brute political power was already in effect.

Let us go even further. In a radicalization of Heidegger, for whom the abandonment of Being in our comprehension of beings is posited as a historical catastrophe, Jean-Luc Nancy has even defined abandonment as the condition of being as such. That is to say that the abandonment of Being is not a historically contingent and particular event, but that it is simply what Being is, or, how Being gives itself to us. As the face of the lover in Baldwin’s novel, Being, for Nancy, is given only in its withdrawal. Yet, speaking of a ‘known unknown’, as I’ve done in the case of Baldwin, would no longer be adequate, since Nancy’s ontological account of abandonment is in no way epistemological, but instead concerns the (non-) ‘ground’ of all knowledge. Nancy, in a way, is like the figure from Baldwin’s novel, staring into the face of Being that is never simply itself.

However, while Nancy’s ontologizing of Heidegger’s historical analysis is a step in the right direction, insofar it emphasizes the fundamental non-presence of Being, positing abandonment as the final word leaves us rather empty handed. It seems to me that Baldwin’s description of the face of the lover is similar, yet provides us with something to go forward with, something that renders love possible in the soft breeze that is mystery. And, if we would define Being itself as nothing but abandonment, what would offer us hope in a world terrorized by sovereign maniacs?

Was this not, my dear reader, the question that Max asked in his series on taking distance: “Through concepts, ideas, and abstractions, philosophers possess the gift of transforming the everyday, rusty world into a fascinating playground with infinitely many intriguing dimensions. Yet the desire to take distance also conceals a fear of becoming stranded in the mill of mediocrity”. Did he not showcase in this series that taking distance can both be the limitation of freedom and the accessing of freedom?

So, how is mystery invested into something? How can the face that withdraws from our grasp, that abandons, also be the face of the lover? Let me draw attention to what was known as ‘parabasis’ in Ancient Greek theater. It refers to a specific moment in Ancient Greek comedies, namely when the play is interrupted and the chorus speaks to the audience directly in order to comment on the play, or something else like politics or philosophy. The word parabasis (παράβασις) is made up of para (παρά), meaning ‘beside’, ‘alongside’, ‘beyond’, and basis (βάσις), meaning ‘a step’, ‘a walk’, ‘a going’. It is connected to the verb parabainein (παραβαίνειν), which means something like ‘to step beyond or transgress’. Parabasis, as such, functioned as a transgression of the norm, a step outside of the play. The parabasis offered to the playwright the opportunity to directly engage with the audience in a manner that allowed for jokes and philosophical commentary. It was a space of improvisation, a place of freedom.

Those speaking in the moment of parabasis are not on the same level as the audience, as they are still connected to the play, but neither are they like the actors in the moment of the play. They have abandoned the play in order to open up a space of improvisation. This improvisation is not like the ‘improvisation’ of daily life that would define the audience. While the audience does not participate in the play, and the actor fully coincides with it, the chorus in the moment of parabasis belongs to neither, it ‘belongs’, but to nothing but a not-belonging. Therefore, parabasis is the place of the face of the lover. The lover, in the passage of Baldwin, appears as no longer part of the play, saved from their role, their persona without entering again the anonymity of strangers. This is also why love always takes form as the interruption of our day-to-day life.

Indeed! Max, in his last text on Thought Magicians, perfectly expressed how writing can be a way to appropriate parabasis: “through writing, I can turn this thrown-ness, the anonymity of history through which I tend to think and speak, into something that is an intimate alien, a form of personal impersonality”. Writing can be a way of appropriating the impersonal that lives us, that makes us move forward, without turning it again into the personal. It is a break, a parabasis that invests the world with mystery: an act of love.

To take love as a way forward, to love the interruption, then, is to inhabit a space that makes interruption reveal that the play itself was in fact nothing but the interruption of interruption, a double and empty ‘parabasis’ (just like the ‘rules-based order’). To love is to fully embrace the other as mystery, a mystery that we ourselves created through the shadow of something empty.  Parabasis reveals how abandonment is also the opening up of love. Here the well known phrase “if you love someone, you should let them go” becomes clear. To truly love someone means to continuously abandon the ‘someone’ that we think they are, to abandon the way in which we already know them, in order to let them, and ourselves, breathe.

The paradox of love, then, is similar to the paradox of night-walking that Max expressed once so clearly: “This is the stunning paradox lying at the heart of nightwalking: walking around, alone, and paying attention to the world, is perhaps the best way to feel a sense of belonging to that world, if only for a brief moment”. In the moment in which the world stops for a moment, in which its action is interrupted for a second, we can start to really belong to that world. The question then, is how to walk in the night?

One of my teachers once said that it is not possible to end a project. Instead we can only abandon it. We or others can always return to it, pick it up, and enter that space of impersonality and make it our own once again. To abandon a project, then, is not much different from looking into the eyes of those that we truly love: to open up life for new possibilities, to take a dive into the mysterious world that humans inhabit.

Bedankt vriend, zie je bij de volgende.