Abstract
Overshadowed by the momentous arguments of the Storrs lectures, Ackerman’s analogy between citizenship and marriage has gone almost unnoticed. The extract has attracted little or no attention in the accumulating literature on civic republicanism. The oversight is regrettable. The analogy is ingenious; it fits surprisingly well at various levels of abstraction; it illustrates and familiarises the weighty claims. Indeed Ackerman could not have drawn the symmetry with more insight. However, in its ingenuity lies its danger; it highlights all too convincingly the deep paradox of the civic republican containment thesis, namely that of leaving politics behind in the name of politics.
Die Liebe existiert nur im noch nicht (Luhmann)
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Notes
Ackerman, 1984, 1042, my emphasis
ibid.
My analysis in this section is heavily indebted to Luhmann’s Liebe als Passion (1982(.Luhmann however does not aim to contra-distinguish love to marriage and is careful to historicise the development of the semantics of love. In that sense my argument does his injustice.
Madame de la Fayette, La Princesse de Cleves, quoted in Luhmann, 1982, 124, n5.
ibid, (my trans.)
Such snapshot accounts of the semantics of love, peculiar to the time and the artistic form, may be thought unsuitable for sweeping generalisations. Luhmann is careful to distance his own exploration of the semantics of intimacy by historizing his account of the forms and ‘cultural norms’ by which emotions were felt. I have a legitimate reason for disregarding such subtlety. As Luhmann himself concedes, in the semantics of love today, distinctions and symbols from the past are operationalised anew, re-embedded and radicalised; and in the process, love, as never before, folds into a self-referentiality of its own, uncoupled from any direct control that would dictate the conditions of entering and developing the loving relationship. (1982, 201 and ch 15 passim).
There are obvious analogies with ‘limit situations’ in politics (Benhabib, 1994, 17) and constitutional politics (crises of constitutional continuity-see Carl Schmitt here among others-and the question of sedition above) that I have discussed in their own right, outwith this analogy. But the ‘in the shadow of divorce’ argument gives us a fine opportunity to address how the modalities of time vary between reasons advanced from the divorce perspective and those from love. In the first case one argues from the point of view of the future pathology or end as to what constitutes a valid present reason, in the second one argues from the present with a view to a future that is always open, always tending to future expansion. The difference in time modalities can be designated as that between the present/future and the future/present.
Luhmann, 1982, 83
See the discussion of ‘roles’ in chapter nine.
ibid., 18, ch2 passim and ps 26ff, 219ff
Of Nadja, Breton says: ‘Even while I am close to her, I am closer to the things that are close to her’ (Breton, Nadja, p104). Nadja herself becomes a sign for shifts of places and things; of Paris where she shifts from quarter to quarter with Breton, and of objects: Nadja’s glove, her clothes. What is important is not that these are sites that mediate the intimacy but that they become meaningful through the intimacy they mediate; the world acquires meaning because the beloved inhabits it, and its objects become signs of that love, events increasingly over-invested with meaning as artifices of love.
One can employ a softer term than ‘rules’ to claim the opposite: that love is full of conventions. Such conventions operate to provide visible indications of love and remove the constant recourse to the deep-level questions. Conventions provide such criteria of ‘correct’ loving behaviour. However, after the lover has brought the beloved flowers for the fifth consecutive anniversary, the latter may turn and say: ‘flowers again! you do not love me any more.’ The convention may be questioned in the name of love. This self-reflexive move on the part of love, its ultimate appeal to itself, shows that the convention holds no power in love, other than a short relief, that breaks down when it is questioned. Normative expectations from rules (the ones operative in marriage) do not ‘learn’ in this way. It is in view of this, that I have made no references to the operative conventions in love and that is why, therefore, my essay is sociologically so ‘thin’. My interest has been to contrast love and marriage at the conceptual (‘philosophical’) level.
In Luhmann, 1976, 135. For more on Luhmann’s analysis of time see 1980, ps 235-300, and his chapter’ struktur und Zeit’ in 1984, ps 377-488. Note the proximity of this approach to time, with Castoriadis ‘collapse of time into its future horizon:’ à etre‘.’ Time is’, he says, in the sense of it ‘being towards’. (1975, ps293ff)
‘Die Liebe existiert nur im noch nicht’ (1982, 89)
This gives love its specifically episodic character, in the systems-theoretical sense of episodic-as something that prepares for its own end, as Sean Smith notes in his ‘The Complexities of Complex Equality’, (unpublished Ms)
In Nadja for example, very little ostensibly happens, sometimes nothing at all, yet the lover-narrator continuously brings events to our attention, momentous events capable of changing his life. These events only come about as he over-invests what happens with meaning. Without love there would have been no punctuation of the continuum, nothing to break or interrupt the flanerie in Paris or the early morning (non-)happenings at the Quai aux Fleurs (in L’Amour Fou) (See also the brute/institutional fact ‘ontological’ discussion earlier on what is ‘carved out’ as occurence)
‘to change forms, and always to consume something new’ (Luhmann, 1982, 90-1)
‘Wie der Pfeil die Sehne besteht, um gesammelt im Absprung mehr zu sein als er selbst. Denn Bleiben ist nirgends’ (Rilke, Duineser Elegien, 8)
It was pointed out to me by David Garland that it is not chance that lovers attribute their relationship to but fate, making accidents appear as necessities, coincidences as destiny, as events pre-programmed by fate. This is indeed a striking feature of the semantics of love. In Luhmann’s analysis, the closure through chance of love that made it ‘absolute in and of itself (in sich selbst verabsolutiert)’ created the paradoxical reference to chance as ‘necessity,… as fate, or even … as freedom of the will’ (1982, 181)
This openness to risk is most prominent in Nadja. The submission of love to risk, to danger or to endless possibility, (or to both as in the book’s final chapter’s footnoted incident), is elevated here to nothing less than the condition of a love that is because it is in risk, a love that-as always tentative (never yet accomplished)-demands more risk, and love that absorbs all risk by defining what risk means self-referentially.
Legal reason constituting the ‘forme par excellence da la violence symbolique legitime,’ in Bourdieu, 1986, 3
See Bankowski, 1993
The replacement of reasons from love with middle-range reasons from role may unburden anxiety, but for the partner who loves such recourse on the part of the beloved may become intolerable. It may even serve to increase complexity if the recourse to exclusionary reasons from role on the part of the beloved, is evaluated by the lover as hesitation to act from reasons from love.
This function remains latent, in that marriage presents its semantics, its codifications, descriptions and structures to make sense of the fluidity of love as necessary. The existence of a different semantics and their appropriateness never becomes a problem for law, because law does not posess the reflexive structure to accommodate such questions. The exclusionary reason stands in for the reasons that fall within its ambit and moreover prevents recourse to them. By presenting its own codification as necessary, law downplays its contingency, and thus its exclusion of a competing codification of love is never accounted for.
Except one that is; that not everything needs to be thus problematized. Each system, Luhmann tells us, confers exclusivity to its own claim to reality.
Ackerman, 1984, 1072
See chapters twelve and thirteen.
It is interesting to contrast Ackerman’s zealous celebration of the moment of constitutional politics which ‘invests a certain aspect of the personality [of private citizens] with heightened significance,’ as they’ say to one another “This time, we really mean it!’” (1984, 1041), with Luhmann’s more cautious approach to the function of public opinion (in 1990, chs 2 & 8.) According to Luhmann, public opinion operates as a mirror for the political system, providing answers (affirmation or disappointment) to expectations projected by it. Ackerman’s constitutional moments of popular mobilization are for Luhmann occasions when societal noise forces a variation in the pattern of expectations to be projected, and assures in this way a return to order.
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Christodoulidis, E.A. (1998). On Love, Marriage, Law and Politics. In: Law and Reflexive Politics. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 35. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3967-0_18
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