Sex and love as two confrontations with the real | The relation between fantasy and striated spaces in Deleuze's philosophy
What follows is an excerpt from my upcoming book "Intersubjectivity and its paradigms". In this chapter, I explain Jacques Lacan's concepts of "the real", "reality" and "fantasy", as well as the relationship between sex and language and the Lacanian view of human sexuality as a confrontation with the real according to Alenka Zupancic's book "What is sex?". Then, I comment on Slavoj Zizek's and Alain Badiou's philosophies of love and introduce the concepts of "smooth and striated spaces" from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari in order to explain my theory of how love functions in a similar function to sexuality, the difference between them being that the former operates on a striated space whereas the latter on a smooth one.
THE REAL, REALITY
AND FANTASY
“The real” for Jacques
Lacan is not just “physical reality”, but instead is defined as whatever is
neither symbolic, nor imaginary. In other words, it is unimaginable and
unsymbolizable, it is whatever is impossible to think about
(unimaginable) and impossible to talk about (unsymbolizable). It is the
locus of “nonsense”, contradiction, chance, randomness, the unexplainable, etc.
Despite the real being “invisible” to both thought and speech, it has a
profound effect on our reality. It is exactly that nothingness, that
nonsensical void that still changes our reality. You can never directly
interact with the real, but you can feel its effects.
The best example of
“the real” in our universe is the singularity of a black hole. It morphs time
and space around it, and yet time and space stops working inside the
singularity itself, and thus, by definition, we can never perceive what is inside
the singularity of a black hole because our perception relies on the working of
time and space in the first place. So, despite the fact that we will never see
or even become able to imagine what is inside a black hole, it has a
huge effect on the space around it.
Whenever we experience
the real, it shatters the stability of our experience, it destructs all the
stories we tell ourselves and we enter the realm of instability, of the new,
and of the vulnerable. Meaning is deconstructed, things stop “making sense” and
there is no order of things, and there is no system of how to make sense of
things in the first place. One only needs to speak to a war veteran or a rape
victim suffering from PTSD in order to understand the unexplainable and
unspeakable horror of the traumatic event that most often leaves the subject in
silence as their only possible reaction.
There is a good side
to this as well, however. There is no new without the real. Whenever we
encounter the real, we encounter the chaos of the destruction of our previous
reality and the creation of a new one. The feeling that we get whenever we have
such an encounter with the real of the new is what Lacan calls jouissance.
Jouissance is the feeling of “is this the first thing you feel when you are
born?”. And the baby actually feels this: the first breath of air in the
lungs, the first sip of milk from the breasts, the first ray of light that
touches the eyes – all of these are felt like a traumatic, violent intrusion
upon the body, something the body never experienced before, something that
causes confusion and disorientation. The body does not know whether it’s a good
thing or not, it has not gotten used to it, it does not know what to classify
it as since it has not yet developed a rule for how to classify such stimuli in
the first place. That feeling of not being able to “classify” (imagine,
symbolize, etc.) an entirely new and foreign stimulus is called jouissance
and it’s the surplus that we end up with after any traumatic encounter with the
real. Through this encounter, an entirely new reality is created with its own
order and rules. For another example, think of a person who has never worn
contact lenses and who tries them for the first time.
What is important to
remember is the encounter with the real is not only the feeling of “I have
never experienced this before”, but it is actually the feeling of “I have never
experienced something like this before”. Because the former is actually
every stimulus, since you can never experience the exact same thing twice, with
absolutely no changes. However, that does not mean that such a thing would be
an encounter with the real, since even though you’ve never experienced it
before, you experienced something similar, so you still have a frame of
comparison. The real is when there is no frame of comparison.
The real is antithetical
to reality. Reality is more strongly linked with fantasy than with the
real. Since we can never experience the real (by definition), it must be
mediated through fantasy. Whenever we experience the real, it is too
much of a traumatic experience to deal with, so we must create a “story inside
our heads” to retroactively explain what just happened after our encounter with
the real. As a fun fact, this was Freud’s basis for his theory of PTSD, that
what we consider trauma is not the traumatic event itself (the real), but the
story we tell ourselves to retroactively explain it after the event.
By “fantasy”, I do not
refer to an imaginary landscape, separate from reality, as it is the case with “daydreaming”,
for example. Fantasy is not separate from reality. Fantasy is the filter
through which we view reality. In one of his Youtube lectures ("The Real
of the Capitalist Illusion"), Zizek explains fantasy through the mobile
game Pokémon Go. Fantasy is not a separate, imaginary reality, it is an augmented
reality. In Pokémon Go, you open up your phone with your front camera, you walk
outside your home and you see the physical, tangible reality, just as it is in
real-life, also on your phone, but somehow filtered or distorted (in this case,
of Pokémon Go, with the addition of several Pokémon). The infamous “Google
glasses” are another example of augmented reality. Sci-fi movies love to play
with this idea as well: you put some glasses on, and you see the same reality
but with an “extra filter” – you see an object and the glasses tell you its
proprieties, etc.
Another analogy for fantasy:
the actual filters on your phone. You open up the camera, you see reality. You
open up the camera and you put a filter (“black and white”, “sahara”, etc.) and
you see a filtered reality, a distorted one.
Here is the most cliché
example of fantasy: the optimist sees the glass as half-full, the pessimist
sees the glass as half-empty. Both of them are experiencing the same reality,
and yet they are perceiving different things. The famous Zizek joke about “coffee
without milk vs. coffee without cream” is another example of fantasy – two things
that “are the same but are not really the same”.
The optical illusions
on the cover of this book are two examples of fantasy. One of them is the
illusion that one person may see a vase while another person may see two faces.
Yet, in reality, it is neither a vase nor two faces, it is just a bunch of disorganized
pixels. Both the vase and the two faces are imaginary constructs, concepts in
our head that we layer on top of reality to organize it or somehow make sense
of it. They are imaginary borders around a set of pixels that give the illusion
of an object. All of us are seeing the same book cover: but some people first
see the vase, other people first see the two faces. Each of us has a different fantasy:
each of us drew different imaginary borders around those pixels, giving the
illusion of a coherent reality.
The vase and the two faces on
the cover of this book are imaginary borders inside our heads to separate
pixels in space: just like that, Lacan's clinical structures are phantasmatic
borders and territories inside our heads to organize and structure language.
Fishing is a fantasy,
even if we talk about it as if it is an activity. Fishing is not something you “do”,
per se, but a story you tell yourself in your head to justify what you are
doing. The activity itself is: “putting the fish rod in water and waiting”.
But if you see two people who are “doing the same thing”, you cannot know for
sure whether both of them are fishing. Maybe one of them is fishing while the
other person is tripping on psychedelic drugs and thinking that putting the
fish rod in water and waiting will grant them magic powers. The person who is
fishing is the person who not only does something, but also has a certain story
they tell themselves in their head to justify that something that they
are doing, a fantasy. It is the filter through which we perceive
reality.
“Dating” is another fantasy of contemporary capitalism, even if, like fishing we also talk about it
in the English language as an activity, something you do. But two people could
be doing the exact same thing and imagining different things – one person could
be dating, the other person could be thinking “I’m gonna talk to random
people, get to know them better, befriend multiple people, and if I happen to
fall in love, who knows, I might take the chance or not”. Yet both of them
might be engaging in the exact same behavior, and it would be impossible to
distinguish between the behaviors from an external perspective. Fantasy is the
story we tell ourselves in our heads to justify what we are doing; you can’t
know someone’s fantasy unless they tell you or you read their mind - fishing
and dating are two examples of fantasies that we talk about as if they
were activities (at least in English).
The real is neither
fantasy nor reality. Reality is filtered through fantasy, the real is
everything that escapes reality and fantasy. It is composed of the gaps
and cracks in reality. It shatters our fantasy. It is when things “go wrong”.
If this sounds like a definition of the unconscious, it is because it is – the unconscious
is “real”, in the Lacanian sense.
Examples of violent
confrontations with the real include rape or natural disasters. What is
important is that they shatter your fantasy. The fantasy includes
self-identity. A man could tell himself a story in his head: “I am an employed
person who lives in this town and who has this job and…”, and? And suddenly an
earthquake happens and his entire apartment building collapses and his family
dies. It leaves him speechless. That story in his head about who he is, what is
he doing, what is he supposed to do in the near and far future, what is his goal
in life, what is the meaning of life, all of that shatters in an instant. He
just had a confrontation with the real. The real ruptures the fantasy,
creating a “hole” in it. That hole, that nothingness, is the real. The real
cannot be directly perceived. Even in this earthquake example, the man did not
experience the real. He experienced a confrontation with the effects of the
real. The real is the gap, the hole. It is a “real lack”, a specific type of
nothingness.
SEX IS A CONFRONTATION
WITH THE REAL ON A SMOOTH SPACE
What is sex? Alenka
Zupancic tries to give a Lacanian answer in her book “What is sex?”. I
will try to briefly summarize the main points of her book: "sex",
for Zupancic, is neither an activity nor a mode of human classification, but
the inherent lack inside language itself. A visual analogy that I came up with:
think of the sliding puzzle.
Language is the
sliding puzzle and the missing square is what we call "sex". To
"sexualize" something means not to assign something to something else
but to relocate the lack itself. Sex is what lacks, what "does not
exist", so to speak. This is why Lacan says that "there is no such
thing as a sexual relationship" (and Zizek adds: but there is such a thing
as a sexual non-relationship). Sexualizing something would be analogous
to moving "the gap" in the sliding piece puzzle to another place.
This is why sexuality
is so "taboo" only when we talk about it. The moment we start talking
about sex, it seems that "everything goes wrong" and our defense
mechanisms kick in, defense mechanisms which differ on the individual, ranging
from laughter, shame, embarrassment, anxiety, etc.
This is why sexuality
is so "taboo" only when we talk about it. The moment we start talking
about sex, it seems that "everything goes wrong" and our defense
mechanisms kick in, defense mechanisms which differ on the individual, ranging
from laughter, shame, embarrassment, anxiety, etc.
When a mode of human
classification is sexualized, we call it "being" a certain sex (man
or woman). When an activity is sexualized, we call it "having" sex
(or in certain language, "doing" sex). When a body part is
sexualized, we call it a sexual organ. When a joke is sexualized, we call it a
sexual or dirty joke.
To sexualize something
does not mean to create a long chain of associations towards the act of sexual
intercourse between two genitals. There are many sexualized images that have no
relationship to genitals whatsoever: think of an image in which a woman is
slowly licking the earlobe of a man. There is no penis and no vagina here.
Genitals (and their touch) are simply the organs that are most susceptible to
sexualization, giving the retroactive illusion that sexualization stems from
there, but it is not true. An analogy: think of how the Coronavirus
"sticks to" old and obese people better than to young and healthy
people. This doesn't mean that the Coronavirus was created in the body of old
and obese people. Similarly enough, genitals are more easy to be
"sexualized", but sex is not a product of biology, but a product of
language.
The moment where
sexuality intersects speech/language/”communication”, then things “go wrong”,
basically. Not everyone is embarrassed when talking about sex, but there is always
some sort of irrationality or a break in our usual patterns
whenever we are dealing with human sexual behavior. Simply speaking, human
sexuality does not make sense. We have all our usual “things”, and suddenly we
have sex as the exception. Sex is always “the odd one out”. This makes
sense with the sliding puzzle analogy since Alenka Zupancic defines sex as a
gap, inconsistency or incoherence inside language itself.
Sexual education is a
taboo topic for many conservative people, it is the “odd one out” in a list of
subjects, all of them are okay to teach in school for them, but not sex. Children
laugh when you talk about sex or sex-related stuff, but rarely about other
topics. It is not just conservatives for whom sexuality is “taboo” or “icky”.
Sexuality is just as taboo for the other, “socially progressive” or “socially
liberal” side as well: just look at political correctness in the west nowadays
and how much of a sensitive subject it is to talk about rape and sexual
harassment. For all political camps, sexuality is a taboo topic that you must “tip
toe” around, that you must beat around the bush to talk about. It is just that
conservatives are more uncomfortable with feminine sexuality (being desired)
and progressives are more uncomfortable with masculine sexuality (desiring).
Yet, both of them suffer from a certain “political correctness” around sex and
topics related to sexuality, with intense efforts to censor or at least somehow
“filter” any discussion about them.
Courtly love postpones
reproduction and sexual satisfaction, so it is irrational from the standpoint
of evolution. Sexuality is the thing that people avoid talking about the most.
Nor can evolutionary psychology explain why rape is considered by most to be a
much more deplorable crime than even murder itself: after all, what can be crueler
than death? Yet it is precisely sexual offenders that usually get treated even
worse than serial killers in jail.
If all of this sounds
like how I defined a confrontation with the real in the previous section, it is
because it is. Sex is one of the most fundamental confrontations with the real.
I disagree that it is the only one, of course: later in the book we will
discuss love, hate and violence as well. Religious faith is also a certain type
of confrontation with the real, but that is for another book/article. All five
of them share in common this similarity with the singularity of the black hole –
there is something about them that is irrational, unexplainable, something that
“goes wrong”, that “does not work”, something that morphs everything that goes
around it.
Freud was not unnecessarily
obsessed with sex, as his many critiques say. Freud was obsessed with the unconscious,
and this naturally led him into the subsequent obsession with how humans unintentionally
avoid that which makes them uncomfortable. He looked around him and he saw that
most often, that is sex.
Most people distinctly
remember the first time they found out what sex is, or “where babies come from”.
Finding out about sex for the first time is an event, it is “a thing”,
or I could even say “the thing”. People very rarely remember the first time
they found out how death works, that humans can die; in my case I feel like I
was just born into knowing about death. The moment you first find out about sex
is a distinct moment, almost a magical one, it is “a big deal”. Virginity is
also “a big deal” in our society, but the first time you do anything else other
than sex, it is usually not. You can ask other people to do an activity with
you quite easily, like hanging out, eating together, borrowing something from
them, but not sex – in the latter case, there is much more “bullshit” you have
to go through. In all those examples, sex is the odd one out in a list.
Strictly speaking, sex is “a big deal”. This is how a confrontation with the
real works.
How does this
confrontation with the real compare with other confrontations with the real? I
argue that sex is the most fundamental one. Love, violence and hate are also
confrontations with the real (which is what Lacan did not realize, and where I slightly
depart from him), but that work in a different way, on a more restricted domain
or codomain… Sex is a universal confrontation with the real. The
confrontation with the real is an exception, an “odd one out” in a list, and
yet there is barely any exception in which sex is not “real”, in other words,
there is no exception in which sex is not the exception. This is already at the
realm of double-negation, the lack of a lack. Universality and exception are opposites.
Sex is the universal exception.
Deleuze and Guattari distinguish
in their philosophy between smooth spaces and striated spaces. Their
definition of smooth and striated spaces is slightly different from the
mathematical one. A smooth space is marked by not having boundaries, limits,
borders (it is “de-territorialized”, as Deleuze would put it). A striated space
is, as its name suggests, a smooth space that has been “striated”: either
striated into multiple sub-areas (through boundaries and walls) or striated by
having being given a direction, a sense, a meaning (through the introduction
of a coordinate system, for example). Walls, in the literal sense, striate
space by separating rooms inside a house. “Walls”, in the figurative sense,
striate a smooth space through imaginary borders – the borders separating countries,
the psychological borders separating “inside” from “outside” or “private life”
from “personal life”, the imaginary walls separating public from private and
personal propriety, etc.
Deleuze and Guattari,
in Chapter 14 of their book “A Thousand Plateaus”, give the example of
the sea as a smooth space, but they also say how humans started “striating” it by
mapping it; here is how Lysez and Pisters explain it:
“The sea is a smooth space par excellence: open
water always moved by the wind, the sun and the stars, nomadically traversable
by noise, colour and celestial bearings. Increased navigation of the open water
resulted in demands for its striation. Although Deleuze and Guattari note that
this took hold progressively, the year 1440, when Portuguese discoverers
introduced the first nautical charts, marked a turning point in the striation
of the sea. Maps with meridians, parallels, longitudes, latitudes and
territories gridded the oceans, making distances calculable and measurable.”
(Lysen, F., & Pisters, P. (2012).
Introduction: The smooth and the striated)
Deleuze and Guattari
talk about how the nomadic people of Paleolithic and Mesolithic times lived in
smooth spaces. Literal walls, psychological boundaries, imaginary borders
between nations or the concept of “propriety”: none of this existed. There was
no inside and outside and there was no cartography and mapping. The world of
the nomad was undifferentiated.
If all of this talk
about smooth and striated spaces sounds like a description of fantasy,
it is because it is. What I call “fantasy” in this book is what Deleuze calls “striation”.
Fantasy turns the real (a smooth space) into reality (a striated space).
Fantasy is composed of the imaginary borders separating “self” from “other”
that we call “identity”, or the imaginary border between our organs and everything
else that we call “the body”, or the imaginary lines around the cover of this
book that can make you notice either a vase or two faces. In other words,
fantasy is a striation of reality.
Sex and love function
differently in regards to the real. The real is neither sex nor love, since sex
and love are, to a certain limited extent, both symbolizable and imaginable,
and the real is neither of those. The real can’t be put into words and cannot
be imagined. Sex and love are confrontations with the real – whenever we put
sex or love into words or whenever we imagine them, it is possible, but something
“goes wrong”, something “weird” happens.
Sex is a universal
exception, there is no exception to the fact that it is an exception, an “odd
one out”. Sex is always a confrontation with the real. In Deleuzian terms, we
can say that sex is a confrontation with the real on a smooth space.
There is no striation, it is pure chaos.
LOVE IS A CONFRONTATION
WITH THE REAL ON A STRIATED SPACE
…and this is what
Lacan and Lacanians often miss from their analysis, that almost all of the
things they say about sex apply to love as well the moment you striate
the smooth space of sexuality.
First off, striation,
in the Deleuzian sense (or fantasy, in my psychoanalytic sense), occurs in
multiple ways. The idea of striation includes, but is not limited to the
idea of boundary-setting. An example of a striated space is a bounded
area, bounded in the mathematical/geometrical space. A boundary encloses a
space, separating it into an inside and an outside.
Without going into rigorous mathematical definitions: a bounded area in space
is an area that would be filled by the “fill” function in Microsoft Paint
without filling in anything else outside it.
Love, at a semiotic
level, is bounded sex. Let us look at some examples:
1. Sexuality is almost always an inappropriate or “delicate”
topic in the workplace (with some exceptions, depending on where you work…). In
a formal environment (like work), you wouldn’t describe a sexual experience in
extreme graphic detail in front of everyone. It doesn’t matter if that sexual experience
had to do with you or not, it is still inappropriate. Love functions exactly
like sex if it involves anyone in that group of people. At work, it is
appropriate to talk about the romantic dramas of celebrities. But if there is
some romantic tension between two coworkers, it becomes a taboo subject,
something to tip-toe around. Sexuality is always a subject to tip-toe around,
love is a subject to tip-toe around only when it involves someone inside
the group discussing it.
2. Many people turn towards defense mechanisms
when someone points at their own romantic feelings. It is a cliché scenario for
someone to get embarrassed when someone else says that they are in love, or to
deny it. But we almost never get embarrassed when talking about the romantic
affairs of other people. With sex, it doesn’t matter if it involves you or not.
Sure, a personal sexual experience might be slightly more embarrassing than someone
else’s, but it is a tiny difference in personal attachment to a topic that can
be found in any topic. If someone is embarrassed when talking about sex, it’s
not a huge difference whether that sexual topic involves them personally or
not. With love, there is a huge gap. Embarrassment is not the single
defense mechanism against confrontations with the real. Sometimes it is
anxiety, shyness, sometimes it is disgust, sometimes it is denial. Sometimes it
is talking over the other person and changing the subject (as is the case with
obsessional neurotics). Sometimes it is intentionally bringing up the real in
order to fuck with people (as is the case sometimes in those with a perverted
structure). But some defense mechanism is usually there, even if at a
very subtle, sublime level. You will notice that the defense mechanisms against
confrontations with the real (embarrassment, anxiety, disgust, denial, or
whatever they may be) will manifest in regards to love only when the individual
is personally involved in the situation. With sex, personal involvement does
not matter much.
3. Society is more tolerant of polygamy than
polyamory. Having multiple sexual partners is more and more accepted, having
multiple romantic partners is way harder to accept.
These are three
examples and I think they are enough. The summary is that love always
separates a space into “inside” and “outside”. This is one example of what
Deleuze called “striation”. Sex does not do that separation; it maintains the
smooth space of the real. When this “inside/outside” boundary is crossed or
broken, it is what humans in the past few centuries called cheating.
There is no love without the possibility of cheating, or some sort of betrayal.
Even polyamorous couples have rules that, once broken, constitute cheating.
Such is not the case for sexuality, which does not striate.
There are other
striations beyond “walls” or boundaries. Another example of striating a smooth
space is the idea of causality. Multiple events are on a smooth space if I cannot
constitute a relationship of causality between them. Smoothness is inherently
disorganized, although “disorganization” is not a perfect term for what Deleuze
called “smoothness” since it implies some sort of coordinate system from which
to judge the “level of order” in the first place. A “disorganized” space is
more akin to a striated space that has been smoothed out and then compared to a
pre-existing idea of striation. Nevertheless, here is a popular image I’ve seen
thrown around on Facebook a lot nowadays:
Each picture
represents a higher and higher level of striation. Deleuze and Guattari pointed
out how smooth and striated spaces are only theoretical concepts, thus how in
practice all spaces are a mix of smoothness and striation. In the schema above,
information is more striated than data, knowledge is more striated than
information, etc.
To have multiple
events in a set of events with no order and coherence would be closer to a “purely
smooth” space of events than to a striated one. The moment I tie them together
and give them coherence or meaning, I am striating them in some
shape or form. Such is the concept of causality as well. The moment I
say that one event causes another, I am adding a layer of striation.
This striation is not like a simple boundary separating space. I am not
separating here, I am uniting, in fact, I am giving a direction, an order, a
sense.
Slavoj Zizek often
explains how love and religious faith are the two things in which causality and
time “stop working”, so to speak. True love is when you do not know why you
love someone, true faith is when you do not know why you believe what you
believe. Love is not a comparative analysis of compatibility. It does not work
like this: “girl 1 has 3/10 boobs, 6/10 ass, 7/10 face, 5/10 personality;
girl 2 has 5/10 boobs, 4/10 ass, 9/10 face, 7/10 personality; and so on and you
add up the scores and marry the person with the most points”. The only way
to love is to not know why you love, or to love for no reason. The question “Why
do you love me?” is a trick question. Just as with faith, the proper response
here is: “yes, there are reasons to love the person I love, but to
understand them I must first love them”.
There is a cause of
everything, and as such, there must be a cause for love, but the moment we try
to find it, something “goes wrong”, and I am being intentionally vague here in
order to include all the possible things that could “go wrong” and all the
possible subjective meanings a person may assign to the signifier of “going
wrong”. Perhaps you must not know the cause, perhaps others may feel that they
are objectifying the other if they mention the cause (“You love me just
because of X? So, if I lose X, then you will no longer love me?”). Maybe in
some cases there is some other reason. Love breaks causality.
Slavoj Zizek also often
explains how you never “just fall in love”. Instead, you most often realize
that you have already been in love. You do not notice the exact
moment in time that you fell in love. The fall is a moment of retroactively writing
your past.
Alain Badiou compares falling
in love to an event. An event, for Badiou, is an entire reconfiguration
of your fantasy, of Deleuze’s striation. An event happens, and it
becomes an origin point against which everything else is compared to. An event
is a confrontation with the real, and an entire new fantasy must be created in
order to accommodate for it. The birth of Jesus Christ was an event in relation
to time. We measured time in one way, then Christ was born, and now we always
speak about time in relation to his birth. We speak of a year “before Christ”
or “after Christ”. It is the point of comparison, and as such, the event.
Falling in love is an
event. You fall in love, and you realize that all of your life you have been
waiting for them, for “the one”. Now your entire history, your entire past is
re-written: everything that happened before the event (in this case, the fall)
feels like it was lived just to anticipate the meeting of that special person.
Now, everything that you have lived until you met them feels like it was put
there on purpose by fate just for you to meet them, just like everything that
happened before Christ feels like an anticipation of his birth. After you fall
in love, time itself is separated into “before I met the person” and “after I
met the person”.
Zizek, inspired by
Kant, often makes the point that the most free decisions are those that
retroactively feel imposed by fate. This is the paradox of freedom: the
more free you are, the less free you feel and vice-versa. Zizek distinguishes
between real choices and false choices. False choices are choices
between a pre-determined set of options that do not ultimately have a huge
effect on our lives and in which we do not choose that pre-determined set of
options in the first place. False choices include: Coke vs. Pepsi, 20 brands of
shampoo that are almost all the same, a corrupt political party vs. an even
more corrupt political party.
For Zizek, true
freedom consists not in this superficial liberal freedom of choosing to buy
whatever you want from the shelves, but choosing what is on the shelves in
the first place. Real choices, on the other hand, are the opposite: you
choose “what is on the shelves” without choosing “what to buy from the shelves”,
so to speak. A real choice is a choice that you would’ve never thought that you
could make under your current system of making choices. As such, they require
you to re-write an altogether meta-thinking, a new system of how to make
choices in the first place. For example: a mother being forced by a kidnapper
to choose between which one of her two children to kill and which one to save.
In this way, true
freedom rests in actualizing your potential that is retroactively felt as fate.
Real choices are met by the formula “I had no choice but to”. You never
thought you ever had to make the choice, you re-write an altogether new
meta-system of how to choose in the first place, and after the choice, it feels
like the only choice you could have ever possibly made because you re-wrote the
entire system itself only to accommodate for it. Hence, you had no choice “but
to”. Falling in love is a real choice. It is never perceived as a choice, yet
our actions ultimately determine the outcome. It is an unconscious choice. After
falling in love, the rules of time and the rules of causality stop working as
usual because you rewrote the entire striation of your fundamental fantasy in
order to accommodate to this new aspect in your life, hence love always being the
exception the odd one out to these new rules of time and causality.
Both causality and
time are striations over a smooth space. Hence, we see how love striates and
breaks striations, in works in some shape or form with striated spaces, and it
mediates the relationship between striated space and the real. Whereas
sex is a confrontation with the real on a smooth space, love is a
confrontation with the real on a striated space.
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