A Phenomenological Note on the Structure of Love

            Human feeling is not a social movement; it does not always begin with a declaration. It may have no clearly circumscribed point of origin, no single sentence that can be repeatedly quoted. It is a change in the form of language, when two people who had merely been walking side by side suddenly realize, at a certain moment, that their pace has slowed. They are still walking along the same street; the pale yellow halos of the streetlamps still fall upon the same paving stones; the air after the rain is still tinged with the same damp coolness. And yet the world seems to have rearranged itself through the addition of another gaze. The light in the shop window, the fruit called out by a street vendor, a dog by the window with an expression of hesitation, the brim of a passerby’s hat—these scenes, which were once no more than scenery, suddenly begin to demand to be handed over to the other person, as if the world were no longer simply an object of solitary perception, but something that, at a subterranean level, must be shared. Experience is no longer singular in form; it quietly enters the plural. Such a feeling need not appear in the phrase “I love you.” It exists prior to language, in that shared attention, in that jointly slowed time.

            What is strange, however, is that such moments are not accompanied by any sense of completion; indeed, quite the contrary. They often remain suspended in a certain indeterminacy. The bodies may already have drawn near, the feeling may have grown warm, desire may by no means be absent—yet the relationship is not swiftly propelled into certain named form. There is no explicit confirmation, no advance claim upon the future; it lacks the almost automatic institutional next step demanded by contemporary narratives of love. Thus the subject becomes aware that they occupy a peculiar position: desire exists, yet it has not been fulfilled; intimacy exists too, yet it remains unbound; the future as well exists, yet it has not been possessed. Stranger still, within this suspended condition one gains a nearly transparent calm, as though the relation retains its breath precisely because it has not been completed.

            This stands in conflict with the ideological structure of modern love. In our society, within the love narrative that it has solidified, desire is never something permitted simply to remain. It must always be organized, directed, assigned a destination. Herein lies the greatest force of ideology: not merely that it forbids, but that it shapes how the subject ought to desire. In other words, the most successful aspect of the contemporary ideological structure of love lies in making us believe that if desire is not fulfilled, something is incomplete; if love does not lead to possession, it has failed. Within such a structure, when two people declare, “We are together,” this appears to describe the present, but is in fact an imperative addressed to the future. For it is not simply describing an already existing feeling, but asserting an exclusive right over what is to come. Love is thus quietly transformed into an institutional arrangement of time: people think they possess one another, but what they are really trying to possess is tomorrow.

            It is precisely here that the temporality of desire begins to reveal itself. The essence of desire is to lean forward, to stretch toward a state that has not yet occurred. When one person wants to possess another, what is desired is not merely the body before one’s eyes, nor simply the relationship as it exists in the present moment, but a future that has not yet arrived and has nonetheless already been fantasized as something fixed: tomorrow you will still be here, next month you will still be here, in the future you will remain within my narrative, existing in the way I understand, name, and confirm you. Thus the true object of possession is never the present, but the possibility of the future itself. The essence of possessiveness, then, does not lie in imprisoning an object, but in canceling the openness of its future. It seeks to strip the future of its condition of possibility and transform it into a structure of “already belonging.”

And yet the future is precisely what cannot be possessed.

            Heidegger makes us understand that the human being exists as “Dasein”, not because he possesses some determinate and unquestionable essence, but because he exists in possibility. (Das Dasein versteht sich selbst immer aus seiner Existenz, einer Möglichkeit seiner selbst, es selbst oder nicht es selbst zu sein.) The future is the future not because it arrives later, but because it remains, in its essence, open. Derrida, moreover, shows that meaning is never constituted in full presence, but always comes into being through delay, difference, and deferral. Différance is not only a linguistic mechanism; it is also a reminder concerning existence itself: nothing can ever be fully grasped within an absolutely completed present. If we turn this perspective back toward love, we may discover that the truth of love perhaps lies not in being completed, but in the way it is generated through delay. Love is not proven at the moment of “finally possessing.” On the contrary, it often first reveals its true shape precisely where it cannot be wholly possessed.

            At this point, the question shifts to the position of the subject. Structuralist philosophers usually say: the subject becomes aware that the narrative of love is a structure, and thus “chooses” not to enter it blindly; he understands that desire leads to possession, and therefore “decides” to remain restrained. But such an account still fails to reach the essence of the matter. For the deepest change is not that the subject makes a moral choice while remaining in the same place; it is that the subject itself has already been displaced. Once the subject realizes that the love narrative he once inhabited is, in essence, a structure, the old subject who could “naturally” enter into it has already disappeared. Althusser once told us that the subject is interpellated by ideology: the individual becomes a certain kind of subject because he accepts the identity-position supplied by structure. But once that position is seen, once it is recognized as historical, institutional, and as a mechanism for organizing desire, it can no longer function in a “natural” way. The old subject who naively understood desire as romance, and romance as a form of future belonging, has already come to an end. One does not, then, retreat by “choice” from the old position; one is compelled to stand in a new one: desire still exists, perhaps even more clearly than before, but it can no longer automatically be converted into possession; the future is still possible, indeed still awaited with tenderness, but it can no longer be claimed in advance as a right. This is not a moral decision, but an ontological displacement.

            Thus, maintaining distance does not necessarily mean refusal, nor does non-fulfillment necessarily mean lack. More precisely, it is a new mode of being: the subject can no longer love in the old manner, yet he is still in love. For precisely this reason, such a state brings both pain and freedom. The pain lies in the fact that desire has not disappeared: it still demands proximity in the corners of the night; it still leaves its echoes in the body, in memory, in footsteps, in scent. The freedom lies in the fact that desire has not been swiftly transformed into an institution; the future still retains the dignity of futurity and has not been prematurely reduced to something claimed. Love, for the first time, is no longer a road automatically leading toward possession, but becomes a tension: on one side, desire demands completion; on the other, the subject knows that completion would close off a certain openness. On one side, feeling wishes to draw near; on the other, the subject knows that true nearness is not the same as writing the other into the narrative of one’s own ownership.

            Within such a structure, small experiences take on a different weight. A brief exchange of glances, a smile tinged with shyness, a walk in which the pace slows together, a proximity not named by language and yet already acknowledged by the body—these are no longer preludes to a love narrative, but modes in which love itself appears. For here love first manifests not as “I possess you,” but as “I experience the world with you.” When two people look together toward some small thing on the street, that thing is no longer merely an object being perceived, but becomes a bridge between them. When their pace slows together, time itself seems no longer to belong to the public order, but becomes, for a moment, a private and shared duration. Love, then, is not merely an emotional bond between two people; it is also a new experience of the world: the world becomes shareable, transferable, and something upon which one may dwell together because of the presence of another.

            From this it follows that unfulfilled desire is not the failure of love, but rather one of its conditions. Only when desire has not yet been institutionalized does the relation still retain its breath, still retain the possibility of taking on another form, still allow the future to remain future. The real question is not whether the future will arrive, but whether it can still arrive as future. In other words, the freedom of love does not lie in rejecting the future, but in refusing to turn it in advance into a possessable right. The future remains possible; a relation may still deepen, become more intimate, draw nearer, perhaps even one day naturally enter another form. But none of this may be commanded in advance, nor may it be regarded as the due result of desire. What the subject can do is only this: stop possessing the future.

            Thus the authenticity of love no longer depends upon its outcome. Modern narrative always delights in retroactively determining the meaning of a relation by its ending: if, in the end, the two are not together, then everything that came before seems somehow not truly real; if the relation did not endure, then the tenderness of the past appears to have been nothing more than a passing illusion. This as well is the tyranny of ideology. It demands that all experience submit to the ending, that the future turn back and adjudicate the past. But real experience is not as such. Two lives have, together, truly, and irreplaceably shared the same world—this in itself already constitutes meaning. Even if the future does not continue according to some imagined romantic script, the past is not thereby revoked. The truth of a relation does not depend upon the certification of the future. Once it has happened, it has already left in time a trace that cannot be retroactively abolished.

            When the subject stands in this new position, he need not reject the future, nor need he possess it. He need only acknowledge that desire still exists, the future is still possible, yet possession is no longer effective. Love thus becomes a form at once more difficult and therefore more honest: it is neither naïve nor cold; it does not deny desire, yet it also does not allow desire to monopolize meaning; it acknowledges the seduction of the future, yet refuses to take the future as its own right.

            Perhaps love comes closest to the real not at the moment it is declared, but at the moment it still sustains itself within incompletion. When two people possess none of the certainty recognized by institutions, and yet have already walked the same street in a common posture, have already shared the same world in certain fleeting instants —desire is there, freedom is there, and the future, no longer seized, still remains open.

Love here is no longer the possession of the future. Love is only the allowing of the future to remain possible.

孙锡瑞

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