Seven

 The relationship between love and freedom is difficult to explain. Is it antagonistic or complementary? If freedom becomes absolute, is love impossible or does love simply attain an infinite potency? If love becomes absolute, is freedom made redundant? Is love possible in the absence of freedom, so that freedom is love’s condition? And must all true freedom reconcile itself to love, or its possibility?

I know that love binds, so that the lovers suddenly realize their mutual incompleteness. This is a kind of fall, not from paradise but the opposite: the paradise is gained through the fall itself. Love here produces the lack for which it is the salvation. Thus, love is first positive and productive before it knows any deprivation or loss.

But what can we say about freedom? Either in love there is absolute freedom, or freedom is irrelevant. For when I love truly, I taste the hæcceity of the other—their absolute uniqueness, what the beloved contains within himself which no other possesses. This utter and potent “thisness” we taste (which the Medieval philosophers knew and struggled over), this intoxicates. We drink of the power of the pure difference and uniqueness in the other, who remains both near and far. We never can recover from this experience, for it is the closest we can get to another. It takes us over. It is this hæcceity that produces the desire in us for our beloved. We are at once liberated to the other’s difference and uniqueness and thus free of our own immanent horizon of difference—we become through our beloved, and they become through us. Thus there is a portion of freedom—an absolute liberation or falling away from ourselves to another self—right here in the taking in of another’s hæcceity. Yet, we lose something of the infinite movement of absolute freedom in love because we become through the beloved—thus love in this case is a reduction in the absolute and infinite motion of freedom. So we can say that freedom is not contradicted by love. In fact, we can say that love is simply freedom moving at a low velocity—the velocity which is the characteristic movement of our beloved, in their hæcceity.

Love and Freedom are therefore related by differences of movement, for all fundamental questions return us to the question of time, and speed is nothing but a form of time.

And somehow this relation I’ve tried to describe is already understood clearly only through music, through art alone. And here is where I heard it expressed: —