Love, a toxin that can nevertheless heal

“Toxic love” has become a convenient phrase for almost any uncomfortable experience of commitment. That, the article argues, is the real problem: not the phrase’s circulation, but its use to fill every gap in subjective responsibility.

The idea that love can overwhelm and transform a person is hardly new. In the 13th century, the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti described love as an accident or illness that exceeds every natural measure and knows no rest. It could turn laughter into tears and make the person suffering it unrecognizable. Love, in his telling, was a torment that could also deteriorate into every kind of passion.

Cavalcanti drew on the troubadour tradition and its central Western ideal of courtly love. This was love prevented from reaching fulfillment, sustained through elegant seduction and courtesy. The philosopher Denis de Rougemont argued that only love threatened and condemned by life itself seemed worthy of being told.

What has changed today, the article suggests, is the demand that love stop being an intoxication, a joyful sadness or an ecstasy. Alain Badiou identified the same promise in slogans and advertising campaigns that tell people to find a partner without suffering. The article rejects that promise, while drawing a firm line between emotional pain and abuse. Violence, mistreatment and manipulation are something else, and are serious and condemnable.

The dream of hygienic love imagines a relationship without loss, suffering or failure. Against that ideal, the article invokes Aristophanes’ image in Plato’s Symposium of the lost half seeking completion, and Jacques Lacan’s formulation that love means giving what one does not have to someone who is not. Love therefore brings misunderstanding, stumbling and estrangement. It is less about giving what one possesses than placing one’s own lack at stake. The excerpt ends by turning to literature as the best way to speak about that challenge.