The Dialectic of Love and Power
Towards Empowering Love and Loving Power in Martin Luther King Jr. and Byung-Chul Han
Introduction: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dialectic of Love and Power
Martin Luther King, Jr. is without a doubt a man whose legacy has increasingly turned polymorphous and obscure, oftentimes to the detriment of what he ostensibly stood for. The manner in which Martin Luther King, Jr. is presented in popular culture, for instance, appeals to a certain neutralization of his figure; and thus of his power and the true meaning of his love. The contemporary ambiguity over how we may understand Martin Luther King, Jr. today stems from the liberal appropriation of his intervention upon American injustices — we see this, for example, in colourblind racism that paints itself as if it were a solution to the real antagonism of racism and its structural perpetuation of domination at both cultural and material dimensions. These liberal framing devices cherry-pick Martin Luther King, Jr.; or better yet, what we see here is a commodification of King to the conveniences of liberalism whereby King can be whatever he is needed to be at any one instance. King can be an astounding individual, but never dare stress his commitment to Black empowerment. King can be acknowledged for his non-violence, yet we shall brush under the rug that he was more than willing to be revolutionary and transgressive of law — may we then attend to the repressed memory of King’s understanding of justice in law, whereby in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” King stresses the Augustinian difference between just law and unjust law which is no law at all? (“Letter from Birmingham,” 7) The liberal neutralization of Martin Luther King, Jr. erodes the essential quality to his teaching, to the extent that the FBI can make a celebratory post about him on Twitter.
And yet, again, we must try to remember Martin Luther King Jr. despite of his liberal appropriation in the hope that we may rediscover the radical dimension of his thought. With the contemporary obscuration of his thought, we may also be reminded that King was quite the philosopher as well. One may note his interactions with the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, like in his two-semester under Peter A. Bertocci and Edgar Brightman where King wrote his 1953 essay “An Exposition of the First Triad of Categories of the Hegelian Logic — Being, Non-Being, Becoming” — despite his reliance on secondary material, one may note that King is nevertheless able to captivate the core difference between Hegelian sense of the infinite and the restrictions, limits, and finitude in the work of Immanuel Kant (“An Exposition of the First Triad of Categories of the Hegelian Logic-Being, Non-Being, Becoming,” 197 and 198) [1]. Indeed, in the work of Martin Luther King Jr., we can find an extensive range of philosophy that brings together references to Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the like.
One central philosophical pursuit by Martin Luther King, Jr. upon which we will focus on in this paper is the dialectic of love and power. In the presidential address for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of August 16 1967 as well as in the chapter on “Black Power” from Where Do We Go From Here?, King referred explicitly to this dialectic when he spoke to the contemporary deadlock between the Nietzschean will to power and the Christian concept of love:
One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, the philosopher of the “will to power,” to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the “will to power” in the name of the Christian idea of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love (Where Do We Go From Here?, 37 and 38).
At the core of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dialectic of love and power is the opening of a horizon that reorients both of these notions towards the possibility of empowering love and loving power. And it is the aim of this essay to further explore this space that King has laid out for us in considering what emancipation and freedom can look like today. We are going to address how King’s philosophical and radical work is relevant today by setting him up in conversation with contemporary issues and a more recent philosopher — the Korean-born, German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Rather than strictly focusing on their specific positions, their work will help us further understand the dialectic of love and power as well as the possibility of empowering love and loving power.
The Intense Mediation of Power by Friendship and Love
Towards the end of his book What is Power?, Byung-Chul Han invites us to consider the ethics of power as well as what is extrinsic to power that reorients it from its intrinsic tendencies. In other words, power is often characterized as a continuation of the self in others — as in instances as different as the extension of one’s will in others through violence or through the emphatic submission of others to one’s will. The intrinsic tendencies of power are manifest as compulsions and repetitions of the self that perpetuates itself and its will, in gaining territory and space under its power. Power in itself and by itself cannot regard the other, as it is concerned with the other only insofar as it reflects and expresses the will of the self. By itself and in itself, power’s regard for the other attends only to the extension of power itself (What is Power?, 95). The care of others may be justified only under the primary care of the self (What is Power?, 90).
For Han, what can reorient power from these intrinsic tendencies must be something extrinsic to it, where the continuum of the self in power and its relations can be intervened through friendship and love — both of which pertain an encounter with the other of power and the power of the other (The Agony of Eros, 7). And we must stress that this is not some understanding of the other that flattens out the other into some complementary aspect of myself, which would amount to a compulsory extension of the self again. We can call the rendering of the other into the self-same an “identical difference”. One such example of such an identical difference would be much like the cotidian difference of choosing between Coke and Pepsi. Besides the pedantics of soda-pop connoisseurs, both of these different commodities return towards the identity of Capital accumulation. The little difference is treated as if it makes the Whole difference. Instead, for Han, the other is indeterminate, indefinite, placeless, and no one, whereby the atopia of the wholly Other interrupts the Same (The Agony of Eros, 7). The radically other, as opposed to the identical difference, is perceived as a threat to the stability of the perpetuating self.
In discussing melancholia and depression, Han stresses that love (eros) conquers depression which is essentially a narcissistic malady. Han elaborates that depression arises from the compulsions and repetitions of the self that pursues overachievement, collapses into burnout and exhaustion, while this narcissism does not even amount to self-love. Since narcissistic depression does not even amount to self-love, Han goes as far as to portray this condition as the impossibility to love and the inferno of the Same (as if the capacity to love were just one’s own) (The Agony of Eros, 1 and 4). The disastrous encounter with the other is treated as the unfolding of dispossession [Ent-Eignis], as in the disintegration of oneself to the wholly other accompanied by the happiness of absence: “an annulment and voiding of the Own” (The Agony of Eros, 8). For, though in narcissism we may act as if the capacity to love were just one’s own, the radical, erotic encounter with the other reminds us that love is not just one’s own; rather, it is the annulment of such proprietorial extensions of the self.
Thus, the initial problem through which we are inspecting the dialectic of love and power pertains power as an extension of the self in the other and the threatening intervention of power and its will by others. Power by itself and in itself — in other words, intrinsically — is oriented by a gravitational pull and attraction towards itself. The intervention by the radical other, as in the case of the erotic encounter, highlights an instance of some extrinsic force to that of power that can reorient it.
To further flesh out this idea in the last chapter of What is Power?, Han offers a very peculiar reading of Friedrich Nietzsche both as a philosopher of the will to power par excellence as well as someone aware enough to consider the other of power and its will. Han notes that Nietzsche’s notion of life is that life is will to power, as it partakes intimately in the process of power such as appropriating, overpowering weakness, consuming the alien, incorporating, and perpetuating itself (What is Power?, 89 and 90). Life is impelled, driven, and willed to power as the constitutive aspect of its every desire. Power is behind everything. In this sense, it is hard not to see the loveless power that Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, where we find power relations underlying and undermining “love”. This loveless power would have one believe that the capacity to love is a matter of merely extending oneself over another. Again, as if love were just of one’s own. Indeed, here is where Han highlights Nietzsche’s most uncanny comments on friendship and what is extrinsic to power in a letter to F. Rhode:
…full of thoughts, in a clear and mild sunlight; the autumn of the North which I love as much as my best friends because it is so mature and unconsciously without a wish. A fruit falls off a tree, without help from the wind….in perfect silence, and happy, it falls down. It does not desire anything for itself and it gives everything of itself (qtd. in What is Power?, 96).
The portrayal of friendship is characterized here as an invocation of the other of power and of the will. The intervention of power is “a kind of over-power which contains a singular self-suspension of power within itself” (What is Power, 96). The “over-power,” what puts things into place as the indeterminate, boundless giving over and above power by itself and in itself. The giving at hand takes place unconsciously and without intention, despite any ego that only tries to perpetuate itself in the other — and perhaps most importantly, this form of boundless giving precedes any care for the other as well as any care for the determinate, identical other that complements the self (or as Han puts it, “any emphatic for-the-other”). The importance of this comes with respect to the selflessness of this sense of friendship. While we may expect an ethics and aesthetics of the self in Nietzsche, instead we find an ethics and aesthetics of no one (What is Power?, 96). The type of love we are considering here is also without self or any one in particular, it remains nameless. When Byung-Chul Han says that “Love is dying in the Other,” this entails that “Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death”: “the power (Macht) of eros implies powerlessness and unconscious (Ohn-Macht)” (The Agony of Eros, 24). Bare life and its perpetuation as power, in and by themselves, do not arrive at some form of erotic relationship. Bare life only looks to the affirmation and continuation of itself in an economy of survival, which autoimmunizes itself from the intervention of the other as in the case of the non-economic disruptions we find in eros and death (The Agony of Eros, 25). One loses oneself in the other, lingering on. That is the power of the Other when it is not suppressed under the Inferno of the Same and its Repetition.
Whereas power is driven by the convictions and judgments of a self continuing itself in others, what we find in love, friendship, and the other of power is justice. Justice is opposed to the centralizing, gathering structure of power, whereby the boundless generosity peculiar to justice is based on a suspension of the self. The self is reserved and suspended in an attentiveness towards the Other — in other words, one’s opinions and convictions are set aside in hearing and listening as a singular, indeterminate abstinence which cannot be intrinsic to power (What is Power?, 92). The space over which the self spreads its power and gravitational force is reconfigured around the gravity of the Other and a space besides the Own. In this sense, we are in agreement with Martin Luther King, Jr. that “In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice” (Where Do We Go From Here?, 37). Indeed, in anticipation the white liberal attempts at the neutralization of Black power, love alone is not what Black people need, but also justice.
It is not enough to say, “We love Negroes, we have many Negro friends.” They must demand justice for Negroes. Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all. It is merely a sentimental affection, little more than what one would have for a pet. Love at its best is justice concretized. Love is unconditional. It is not conditional upon one’s staying in his place or watering down his demands in order to be considered respectable. He who contends that he “used to love the Negro, but . . .” did not truly love him in the beginning, because his love was conditioned upon the Negroes’ limited demands for justice. The white liberal must affirm that absolute justice for the Negro simply means, in the Aristotelian sense, that the Negro must have “his due.”(Where Do We Go From Here?, 97).
We may note that the love that King calls for is unbound, unconditional in its call for justice as a suspension of the power of the perpetuated self of Whiteness. The divestment from Whiteness opens up an attentiveness to the space and realization of Black power. Without this call for justice, this love is powerless. Or as Han quotes from Nietzsche: “Justice, by contrast, ‘wants to give to each his own, whether the thing be dead or living, real or imaginary’” (qtd. in What is Power?, 92). The crucial element that ties the call for justice in both Han and King amounts to the singular abstinence of the self which cannot originate from power as such (What is Power?, 92). Or as King elaborates of anti-Black racism:
A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis. (Where Do We Go From Here?, 95).
Indeed, to the liberal invested in Whiteness, the call for Black justice is perceived as a catastrophic encounter with the radically other, the other that cannot be flattened out into the self. Blackness continually ends up weaponized as a manifestation of White anxiety over the claim to power and its gravitational forces that orient everyday life and the habitual. Much the same way that fascism is prior to the concentration camp, we may stress that white supremacy is prior and despite the ostensive hate group and xenophobic organization. The latter expressions of such power conflate power with violence and coercion, whereas we may broaden power’s ability to extend the self in the other to be possible with more subtlety. The concentration camp, the hate group, and the xenophobic organization are expressions of a weak power desperate to secure itself. The power at hand is expressed as violence and coercion because fragile and immediately exerting itself upon others. In this respect, for example, representatives and councillors of a Head of State acts as mediators that disperse power from its centralization; and it is in the absence of mediation that the displays and manifestations result in the direct exercise of power (What is Power?, 4 and 5). In this respect, it should be unsurprising to see the return of the racialized immigrant concentration camps during the uncanny regime of Donald Trump in the United States of America. The role of representatives in the United States must have been confusing to them insofar as it required an understanding of the importance of their mediation of power; as instead of mediating power, the operations of the executive head of the State, however compulsive or repetitious, were enabled into a perverse perpetuation of the self. The problem in the United States of America was prior to Trump though the concentration camps and Trump are symptoms of it. In the United States of America, as well as in many places around the world, there is a current vacuum of power, as an unstable, absent centre of gravity to power. Trump is the theatrical portrayal of the regressive, infantile demands for recognition of one’s racist self invested in the perpetuation of imperial Whiteness. The infantile regressiveness is nevertheless the expression of a suppressed fundamental vulnerability in the weakness of weak power to the preservation of the self and power in and for itself, despite anything besides it. Indeed, King notes this as he consider the sentimental attachments to habit in liberal Whiteness:
Over the last few years many Negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society, but the white liberal who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers tranquillity to equality. (Where Do We Go From Here?, 93).
This is what highlights the core meaning to racial emancipation, the white liberal committed to white habituality must lose themselves. We could even argue that we identify ourselves with our symptoms, as our attachments and detachments may be telling of who we are. We may consider, for instance, Alenka Zupančič’s commentary over the emancipation of the non-relation and the confrontation of the Real antagonism at hand in her book, What is Sex? The abolition of the non-relation coincides with emancipatory and radical projects — for example, Zupančič highlights cases in the 20th century, such as in the case of communist revolutions, feminist movements, and anti-colonial pursuits. Often intertwined to catastrophic results, as Zupančič sees it to be “inherent in the very honesty of the will to abolishing the non-relation” (What is Sex?, 31). In the case of feminism, its central politicizing gesture of feminism is then asserting that “the Woman does not exist” as an emancipatory loss of identity, one that recognizes the female identity to reinstate the exclusion characteristic of social antagonism as if it were belonging. As in all these cases, for instance, the emancipation at hand is from identity, from a certain given place and belonging in the world. We may consider this from the clinical point of view of psychoanalysis, where the “will to get better” may be expressed in bad faith and cannot be taken at face value (A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 3 and 4). The honesty of the will to abolish the non-relation may be contrasted to this “will to get better”. The honesty at hand is one that admits and yields to the catastrophic loss coinciding with emancipation, whereby the modus operandi at hand pertains a new order and a new notion of who we are in opposing the non-relation and attempting to force out the non-relation by all means possible (What is Sex?, 31).
At the eleventh presidential address for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King retells the story of juror Nicodemus turning to Christ for salvation. The juror came upon Christ pondering how he will be saved, especially when the roots of evil perpetuate themselves in their expansion — if one will lie, then they will steal; if they steal, they will kill. This self-perpetuation of evil as the Inferno of the Same lands us into Christ’s teaching to Nicodemus: “So instead of just getting bogged down on one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, ‘Nicodemus, you must be born again.’ In other words, ‘Your whole structure (Yes) must be changed’” (“Where Do We Go From Here?”). The White evangelical Christian obscures this radical dimension of Christ’s teaching, as they only reinforce the self and its Kingdom as if it were God’s — they cannot be born again, they are not willing to die in Christ as the symbolic stand-in for radical Otherness, the poor, the weary, the displaced, the lost lost to a soul-crushing appropriation of religion. Calling for Black Jesus should be unsurprising to us in this respect, as this is a call for re-opening that dimension of life, power, and love whereby one gets lost in the Other.
Perhaps one of the more curious, yet adequate expressions of this call for Black Jesus comes from the documentary Trigger Warning with Killer Mike, hosted by the Run the Jewels musician and political advocate Killer Mike himself. In appealing to the spiritual dimension of the revolutionary, Killer Mike engages on the question of reviving the image of Christ which was comedically, yet powerfully expressed in building a church around his friend, Sleepy. Killer Mike quite clearly turns to the next person to find the divine in them and in us in an attempt to reclaim the divine in Blackness. The Church of Sleep is woke. The most important remark that sticks out for us is that: “We need somebody who about all that shit rap music is about, but in a holy way… Look at Sleep. Had it not been for this man, I would have remained selfish, and narcissistic. And Sleepy believes in us” (Trigger Warning with Killer Mike, “New Jesus,” 9:00). In building a church around sleep and Sleepy, Killer Mike and Sleepy open up a space for the restless and exhausted to sleep whereby to sleep is to build the foundation to dream. Killer Mike addresses that for Black people in America, sleep and rest come with stigma that frames them as lazy and unproductive, which he traces down to the writings of Frederick Douglass (Trigger Warning with Killer Mike, “New Jesus,” 13:55). As Killer Mike elaborates, this reduction of the space of the Other by Whiteness sees its continuation in losing sleep over anxiety surrounding “over-policing, being economically forced to live in noisier, condensed environments, and for any one to succeed financially, sleep is dismissed as a weakness” (Trigger Warning with Killer Mike, “New Jesus,” 14:00). As one of the disciples of the Church of sleep eloquently mentioned, “…most of my life, I’ve had to like, fight for anything. And when you are fighting, you are not at, really, peace. And that’s something I ultimately want (Trigger Warning with Killer Mike, “New Jesus,” 14:46). In being given the gift of sleep, they realized they could continue giving in charity; thus, after an exercise of sleep, they opened themselves up to keep on giving passing on their pillows and blankets onto others less well off. Much like to be born again means to die in Christ, in the Church of Sleep, the other of sleep opens up a space to resign ourselves into the Other.
As the disciples get lost in Sleepy’s friendly gaze and in sleep itself, we may consider the vast vision of friendliness over what power by itself overlooks. By itself, power’s sense of vision and visibility only serves itself. As Han notes: “Power can only extend its vision for the sake of the vastness and the things that populate this vastness if it is touched by something that is not power, that is not circling around the self” (What is Power?, 91). It sees, it hears, it listens to the other stripped down expectations, intentions, anticipations, convictions and judgments of the self and its will as an attentiveness to the Other in its otherness. Friendliness and love are, thus, intense mediations of power and the self it extends.
In this respect, we must draw a distinction between the proper sense of freedom and its current accepted terms. Freedom is often characterized by the feeling of freedom and by the ability of the self to accomplish something. If I can, then I will. However, we shall be quick to note that this has amounted to a compulsory sense of freedom, whereby we find the coincidence of freedom with its opposite as the End of Freedom. For, how meaningful can a compulsive freedom be? In this case, Han stresses the dictum under the neoliberal, capitalistic sense of compulsory freedom: “Protect me from what I want” (Psychopolitics, 15). We may remember too that when we look at love and friendship, they cannot be realized by oneself alone as if it were a mere matter of power. In fact, “Eros is a relationship to the Other situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability. Being able not to be able to (Nicht-Können-Können) represents its negative counterpart… [whereby] A successful relationship with the Other finds expression as a kind of failure” (The Agony of Eros, 11). The matter at hand, and why this is only a “kind of failure,” is that the erotic relationship to the Other is besides and despite the self and its anxieties. And in the face of the compulsory freedom of neoliberalism and in trying to revitalize freedom, we find that freedom today is only possible through the intense, extrinsic mediation of power by friendship, love, and otherness.
The Intervention of Power and the Will by Love, Friendship, and the Other
At the beginning of his book Psychopolitics, Byung-Chul Han contrasts the neoliberal subject, its sense of freedom, and its capacity to sustain relationship with others to an Indo-European original sense of freedom as “being amongst friends” (Psychopolitics, 2). As Han writes:
As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose free friendship would even look like. Originally, being free meant being among friends. Fundamentally, freedom signified a relationship. A real feeling of freedom occurs only in a fruitful relationship — when being with others brings happiness (Psychopolitics, 2 and 3).
In the neoliberal understanding of friendship, these relations are still self-serving insofar as they are sustained by pretexts such as utility, intention, expectations, and the like. Our reception of the other remains conditional. The neoliberal subject cannot understand the indeterminate sense of friendship concerning no one. When the neoliberal subject calls someone a friend, it is as a kind of economic investment towards their self-extension rather than a divestment and interruption of such a circular state.
Love today is only possible by being empowering, otherwise it is not love. And yet, we are plagued by the concern that it is power that mediates and intervenes upon love, though it should be the other way around. Thus, we find questions of powerless love or purified sexuality in instances such as Christianity and Capitalism that operate as processes of the continuation of an extended self, where or not it is God or the Invisible Hand as the higher Relation that exploits and conceal the restlessness of non-relations and social antagonisms in the Other (What is Sex?, 13–15 and 32).
Power’s intervention of love and friendship can come in many ways. We may not that violence may disturb our intimate relations. Violence arises when power has a low or weak mediation of power’s exertion; and in love and friendship, violence may reflect weak bonds and relationships. [2] When power intervenes upon love and friendship, the extension of the self in power tries to mediate, regulate, and purify love and sexuality, as if any of these things were about oneself. For example, we may occasionally here the negative denial “I am not gay though” as if love were about oneself and the regulation of identity. In this respect, one sees only what one wants for oneself in the other by looking the other way of the radical otherness of the other. The Real tension or radical non-relation in love is covered up by some higher Relation — as if lovers could be consumed into the One. The non-relation as the concretion of power sharpens the disjunction between self and other, whereby they only share the power relation in a roundabout way, together apart from one another, in asymmetry. If love is treated as if love were up to oneself, then we are dealing with a powerless love which has no friendly gaze extended over to the other in acknowledgment of non-relation and Real antagonism constitutive of who they are in an oppressive State. To be born again requires a certain emancipatory death in ourselves to make space for the other; undoing ourselves to make space for a good world, the good place is only possible by yielding to the radical placelessness of the Other.
A crucial lesson may be taken from Lacanian psychoanalysis. One central notion pertaining to the constitution of desire is how desire is stumbled upon and made through suspenseful questions over how the Other desires and how we fit in that picture. Or more bluntly put: Che Vuoi? In other words, one is desiring in accordance with the desire of the Other, or at least insofar as one wonders “What the hell is it that the other wants?,” “What do you see in me that goes over my head?” Though at first an ego may try to treat itself as transparent to itself and as master of its own house in its Imaginary extension of itself, with the introduction of the Symbolic and the Big Other, it turns out that consciousness is apparent to itself only through an-Other. And in the case of the radical, inconsistent Real, we come to terms that because consciousness is apparent to itself only through an-other, consciousness is not transparent to itself. In short, we determine how we desire based on how we situate ourselves in relationship to the desire of the Other; how we construe how we desire may come with inconsistency over its object as well as its subject. Most importantly, the processes of the constitution of desire through and in accordance to the Other’s desire can amount to a sense of desire oriented over either a perpetuating pleasure of the self, the pleasure that the self takes in the other, as well as the pleasure of the other’s own.
In its most perverse form, the pleasure in the other’s body can be quite necrophiliac. The visual drive of such a perverse pleasure can be contrasted from the friendly gaze. On March 15th 2019, one of the shooters of the Christchurch Mosque Shootings posted on 8chan’s /pol/ board an announcement: “time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort”. This 8chan post also contained the infamous manifesto that accompanied the shooting, also posted in other websites such as Twitter under the name Brenton Tarrant. Many social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) played a major role on how these acts of violence were framed by those that identified with the shooters — most notably, a Go-Pro livestream was shared amongst supporters of the shooters that aligned themselves with the myth of “The Great Replacement” and “White Genocide”. The Go-Pro livestream of the Christchurch shooting plays a role analogous to Virtual Reality and HUDs in gaming, whereby the point of view structures and frames the destructive acts of the shooter — vulnerability and precarity, for example, are incorporated and neutralized into this framing device just the same way one would incorporate the possibility of a “game over” screen into a video game that furthers the realm of fantasy. We may look at this post by a well-known white supremacist in the Edmonton region, M. Kirkland “Jim Kirk” (an associate of the Canadian Yellow Vesters, and the Clann in Alberta) on Facebook sharing the livestream:
What we see at work in Mike/”Jim Kirk”’s post is a form of perverse pleasure enabled by the kind of regard towards the other taken up by these organizations — at hand we have a form of voyeuristic fetish tied to a visual drive that characterizes its immersion into the joy of the suffering others. [3] To the extent we can fantasize about the perversion, the excess to the visual frame of the Go-Pro livestream amounts to the space where identification with this visual drive to perverse pleasure takes place. Even outside of the livestream, we can see instances of Mike Kirkland/”Jim Kirk” identifying with the HUD of a first-person shooter as he makes the gesture of shooting at people openly in public:
The visual drive characterized by videogame HUD’s as well as the Go-Pro livestream operate as a framing device of the perverse desire to cause this form of harm. The transgressive, perverse enjoyment of the others’ bodies is necrophiliac insofar as it gets off by their death, where the other is relinquished from their otherness being killed into an inanimate object of enjoyment. Any agency or desire independent of the pervert is killed off, as it is viewed as a threat to the omnipotence of the perversion over and opposed to the gaps that frame fantasy. Much as in Virtual Reality, the frame at work is to experience the joy and pleasure of these acts without actually committing them — and to that extent, it situates the position of identification in relation to the event of the shooting through its disavowal. What is at work in the Go-Pro livestream is this voyeuristic fetish of the terrorist act, where identification with the fantasy-without-gaps acts as a preparatory exercise for the transgressive, perverse act and a call for this type of violence to be repeated. The perversion oversteps the fantasy.
Contrary to the kind of perverse visual drive that we have discussed, the friendly gaze’s regard for the other, their pleasure, and their life is quite distinct. Rather than perpetuating death in the other to extend the self, the friendly gaze detects and senses life in the other and affirms it as well as its power in yielding the self. In her essay “To Sense What Is Living in the Other — Hegel’s Early Love,” Judith Butler offers a reading of two fragments by G.W.F. Hegel on “Love” and “Fragment of a System”. When connection seems possible, Hegel invites us to consider the question of true union or love proper. Hegel qualifies true union and love proper as a relationship of living beings, alike in power, where “in no respect is either dead for the other” (Early Theological Writings, 304). This union is expressed as the exclusions of oppositions, thereby the exclusion of objectivity and separation.
The dispersion from the singular feeling into the manifold concerns the question of both barriers and drives. As barriers dissolve, so do limits and territories; and as drives dissolve, so do compulsions and repetitions. In this sense, love proper entails deterritorialization and reconfiguration. Besides the singular feeling, Hegel writes that “in love, life is present as a duplicate of itself and as a single unified self [qua particular and isolated feelings]” (Early Theological Writings, 305). In this sense, Butler is correct to point out that Hegel moves from living to life itself (Senses of the Subject, 100). This movement is done so that, in the living union in love proper, we only catch a passing glimpse of life as a duplicate. Love may detect life, yet it is not life itself. The living union of love is exceeded by life itself.
Love proper does not pertain the understanding or reason. As the understanding’s sense of unity is the unity of opposites — thereby the question of love proper invites the consideration of an union besides that of oppositions in the understanding. And as reason, which is oppositional in its determining power and how it overlooks love’s exclusion of oppositions (Early Theological Writings, 304). Instead, love pertains feeling [Gefühl], as it neither restricts nor is restricted, therefore beyond limits and finitude — and though love is presented as a singular feeling, feeling is but partial of the whole, where in the accumulation of the declarations of love, love’s feeling is simultaneously singular and non-singular (Early Theological Writings, 304–305). Hegel elaborates, “…the life present in a singular feeling dissolves its barriers and drives on till it disperses itself in the manifold of feelings with a view to finding itself in the entirety of this manifold…” (Early Theological Writings, 305). The life besides mine is a reminder that mine is not the only life and life as such exceeds the specific living union of love. Love finds signs of life, but life itself exceeds it — perhaps the most eloquent manifestation of this is the anxious phenomenon of jealousy, where we may concern ourselves quite restlessly over the desire, the will, and the life of another irrespective of oneself and one’s own. Jealousy can be understood as a conflict and power struggle that expresses itself in weak bonds and ties, coming alongside anxieties of abandonment as if one is under the power of the other’s judgments and convictions. Jealousy is a self-perpetuating anxiety over the power and life of the other; when we are jealous, the other has power over us only to the extent that the other coincides with our own interests and intentions. Jealousy is a minimal recognition of the power and life of the other, however, it still flattens the other into the Same.
Now, whereas in the perverse, visual drive of the Christchurch shooting we inspected an enjoyment in the death of others; the friendly gaze is rather concerned with the empowerment of the other rather than the overpowerment of the other. Or rather, the life of the other insofar as life coincides with power. This distinction is helpful in laying down the path towards love’s intervention of power. When we engage with power intervening and mediating love, we fall back either to the overpowering of the other into compliance and complementarity of the self or to the empowerment of the other. Now when love intervenes and mediates power, the empowerment of the other disrupts the orienting extensions of the self overpowering the other. The friendly gaze reminds us that this regard for the other is crucially indeterminate, without underlying intentions or wishes. Despite me, my will, my wishes, my identity and its supplements (identical differences), there is the indefinite other as the other of will and intention. As Han notes, the other of power is at the border of unconditional hospitality and withdrawal of self to open up a site for justice and the other (What is Power?, 96). Friendship and love are intense and radical mediations of power. Power without mediation, or the immediate exersions of power, is weak and unstable, and it devolves into violence, coercion, and submission. Though there are various mediations of power (representational political structures, financial capital, etc.), who intervenes as the mediator of power matters insofar as power results either in a feigned feeling of freedom in compulsory freedom or a genuine sense of freedom that realizes the freedom in being able not to be able to. Freedom today is only possible through the intervention of power and the will by love, friendship, and the indefinite, placeless other.
Conclusion: The Dialectic of Love and Power Today
Through readings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Byung-Chul Han, we have continued to explore the dialectic of love and power. To this end, we simultaneously stress the following: freedom today is only possible through the intense, extrinsic mediation of power by friendship, love, and otherness; freedom today is only possible through the intervention of power and the will by love, friendship, and the indefinite, placeless other. At the core of this dialectic rests the true sense of freedom as opposed to the vulgar, liberal appropriation of freedom.
As a closing example, we may examine the platitudinal defences of “freedom of speech” as if it were the finest expression of freedom. In the common, everyday defences of freedom of speech, any responsibility of speech is reduced to one’s will and intentions over what one means, as if the self were not characterized by compulsive repetition in perpetuating itself. If there is any proper freedom in speech, it rests in the intervention of the other — which is implied by the responsive and responsible dimension of speech and communicative acts as potential intersubject spaces. Otherwise, speech is unfree and masturbatory, self-serving rather than loving. Love and friendship transforms what the power of communication as well as its guiding sense of freedom these mediations and interventions support and sustain. The violence in speech is only a symptom of its unfree state and an unstable communicative power — exemplary of this, internet comment sections are as awful and sacreligious as they are because they reflect the actual unfreedom and instability of the power therein. Instead, like a love letter, one’s self and words should yield to the power of the other in communicating such a thing as love and friendship, thus re-inaugurating the responsible and responsive dimension to communication and recognition therein.
References and Citations
Butler, Judith. “To Sense What Is Living in the Other — Hegel’s Early Love” in Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Print.
Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Agony of Eros. Trans. Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Print.
— — — Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Trans. Erik Butler. Brooklyn: Verso, 2017. Print.
— — — What is Politics? Trans. Daniel Steuer. Great Britain: Polity, 2019. Print.
Hegel, G.W.F. “Fragment of a System” in Early Theological Writings. Trans. T.M. Knox. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1948. Print.
— — — “Love” in Early Theological Writings. Trans. T.M. Knox. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1948. Print.
— — — Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. United States of America: Oxford University Press, 1977. Print.
King, Martin Luther. “An Exposition of the First Triad of Categories of the Hegelian Logic-Being, Non-Being, Becoming” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume Two: Rediscovering Precious Values, July 1951 — November 1955. Ed. Clayborne Carson, et al. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. Print.
— — — “Letter from Birmingham Jail” written April 16 1963. Birmingham, Alabama. Original Document Scan URL: http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/undecided/630416-019.pdf
— — — “Where Do We Go From Here?,” delivered at the Eleventh Annual SCLC Convention. August 16 1967. Atlanta, Georgia. URL: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/where-do-we-go-here-address-delivered-eleventh-annual-sclc-convention
— — — Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Boston: Beacon Press, 2010. Print.
Trigger Warning with Killer Mike. Dir. Vikram Gandhi. Released: 18 January 2019. Netflix. URL: https://www.netflix.com/title/80144442
ENDNOTES
[1]What G.W.F. Hegel is able to point out is that the Kantian limits of experience and the intelligible remain only but epistemological limitations, as for Hegel will insist that the regulative conditions of experience are in fact ontological principles. The reversal, in short, is that whereas for Kant, things as such remain inaccessible to us, this limit and this inaccessibility to the thing in itself must be key components of the thing itself already as self-consciousness (The Phenomenology of Spirit, 103). Other posts in this blog have a more thorough coverage of Hegel himself.
[2] We may consider the curious example of toxic masculinity. Today, as one of the consequences of the crisis of modernity, many values and ideas that oriented the way we carried ourselves about in the world have vanished. In lack of a center of gravity to orbit around, we have been struggling to reinstate traditional values or creating new ones that are more stable. One of these values has been the notion of “Man” and masculinity, which consistently feel under threat by emancipatory gestures such as that of feminism. Toxic masculinity is best reflected as the decadence of a value which is now quite senseless and placeless. Instead of having a given role and place in civilization, men are anxious at the real encounter of freedom against their habitual, decaying masculinity. Though they may call someone “bro” or “brother” as a way to reassure themselves of having the relations, these are but platitudinal weak relations that do not patch the void in their hearts. Thus, the other side of toxic masculinity is manifested in a diversity of violence at the anxiety of freedom and the instability of their sense of self which is constantly falling under question, unable to resign themselves into the emancipatory potential of “being able not to be able to”.
[3] Though, as should be duly noted, perversion is distinct from fantasy insofar as fantasy thrives through some gap in its knowledge of the other, manifested as doubt or uncertainty. Fantasy tries to fill in the blanks, whereas for perversion, there are no blanks to be filled, no doubt, no uncertainty… the pervert patches over the other, as knowing the enjoyment and desire of the other and for the other better than the irreducibly other.
