Loving Love

Because of something, be it an imposed ideology or something biological or something spiritual, humans believe in love as something they must have. Love has for millenia been, in the heavy majority of cultures, been regarded as amongst the ultimate achievements in a person's life. Derrida says that love is narcissistic. As we discussed in class, narcissism is an individual's needs and the desire for these needs to be filled, to the point of ignorance of the needs of others. Derrida believes that love is narcissistic because it is a projection of one's needs on another. So in preschool when I asked Hannah to be my wife in preschool, I was assuming that she was as strongly in need of the fulfillment of her needs as I was, and that we would ride off on a horse to Minnesota or something along those lines. She was hesitant to answer, and when she broke her arm the next week, I no longer found her attractive and moved along to Play-Do and toy trucks as the only love I really needed. I never did confront her for an answer, so it stands to logic that perhaps Hannah did have the same needs I did, and perhaps I would have successfully fulfilled her needs as projected by my needs upon her and she with hers upon me. I believe that sentence makes sense.

Fact of the matter as I see it is that love is narcissism because our world depends on this idea of love as something that we all must attain. Love is consumerism, and in this case, consumer culture refers to that of the entire globe. This isn't to say that love cannot be good and fulfilling. It is not to say that people are into love simply because they want to achieve love as something in its own right, either. Maybe love refers to the fulfillment of another's needs, and the consumerist desire to arrive at love is indicative of something in people - again, it could be biological, ideological or cultural, or through a greater power - that strives to fulfill the needs of an other. Perhaps the narcissism in love is realized by totally fulfilling the needs of the lover. In this light, narcissism doesn't seem so bad.

As a complete aside, I think the score in the documentary was very strong.

Hannah, if you read this, and your arm is healed, the question still stands.