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Land on Love
“Every production and articulate word, every morsel of nourishment. Every second of sleep, is an atrocity against love and a provocation to despair. Erotic passion has no tolerance for health, not even for bare survival. It is for this reason that love is the ultimate illness and crime. Nothing is more incompatible with the welfare of the human species. ‘I search only for the terror of evil’, writes Bataille, in his adherence to the violent refusal of integral being. ‘Evil is love’, ‘the need to deny an order with which one is unable to live’. The terrestial problematic at its most furious finds a useless undoing in eroticism, so that the decent into love is also fundamental economy, which is perhaps a tragedy, or a joke (something truly hideous and sacred in any case).
That the root of love is a thirst for disaster is exhibited throughout its erratic course. At its most elementary love is driven by a longing to be cruelly unrequited; fostering every kind of repellent self-abasement, awkwardness, and idiocy. Sometimes this provokes the contempt that is so obviously appropriate, and the tormented one can then luxuriate in the utter burning loss that each gesture becomes. One wastes away; expanding health and finance in orgies of narcosis, breaking down one’s labour-power to the point of destitution, pouring one’s every thought into an abyss of consuming indifference. At the end of such a trajectory lies the final breakage of health, ruinous poverty, madness, and suicide. A love that does not lead such a blasted carreer is always at some basic level dissappointed: ‘to love to this point is to be sick (and I love to be sick)’. Yet there are times in which the morbid horror of love infects the beloved, or one is oneself infected by the passion of another, or two strains of love collide, so that both spiral together into a helix of strangely suspended disintegration, cheated of innocent disaster. Each competes to be destroyed by the other, drifiting into the hopeless ecstasies that follow from the severing of all moorings, attempting to exceed the other in mad vulnerability. When propelled by an extremity of impatience this too can lead to suicide of course, but such an outcome is uncommon. The adequate pretext for such a conclusion is lacking, since the capacity to wound is melted from the world, which becomes a softened --- and often almost impercetible --- backdrop, whilst the beloved who is invested with such a capacity to a degree inconceivable to the utilitarian mind, strives to annul it. Thus it is that the lovers conspire to protect each other from the lethal destiny of their passion, either succeeding in this, and relapsing into the wretched sanity of mutual affection, or compacting their fever to new scratch-patches of intensity. In the latter case all legible charts are lacking, and if the real has a splinter-fringe of utter exploration this is it . . .” The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism Chapter 11: Inconclusive Communication. pg. 189 by Nick Land.
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I myself am war.
Georges Bataille (via de-bel-aizin)
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