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FLAG—
How much more easily the leave-taker is loved! For the flame burns more purely for those vanishing in the distance, fueled by the fleeting scrap of material waving from the ship or railway window. Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.
—AT HALF-MAST
If a person very close to us is dying, there is something in the months to come that we dimly apprehend—much as we should have liked to share with him—could only happen through his absence. We greet him at last in a language that he no longer understands.
(Walter Benjamin)
The question of love has long been a privileged site for thinking about the curious ways in which we find ourselves entangled with others. Find, and of course lose… ourselves and others. As such, it has a special relation not only to the dominant (ethical and political) preoccupations of the philosophical and literary discourses which have played such a determining role in our concepts and practices of it, but also to the institutions and theories of psychoanalysis, and in particular to a psychoanalytic reflection on language. For it is not simply in the thematics of desire, identification, mourning, or narcissism, for example, that a psychoanalysis attentive to the disquieting and unpredictable ‘priority’ of alterity has insisted on the constitutive aberrations of love, but at the heart of psychoanalytic practice itself. In a letter to Jung, Freud called psychoanalysis not simply the talking cure but a cure through love, and the co-implication of the two is as necessary as both are difficult. For the analytic event—the encounter with the ear of the other—passes by way of language precisely to the extent that it passes though something like love, something that may no longer be of the order of understanding. This passage, which we could also call divergence,