Magician of insecurity, the poet has nothing but adopted satisfactions. Ash always unfinished.
— Rene Char
There’s a passage in Michael Hardt’s Documenta No. 68, “The Procedures of Love,” that has stayed in my mind recently for the way he expounds the “mechanical.” Italics are mine:
To love someone, then, has a kind of mechanical character, in that your multiplicities and my multiplicities are able to form compositions that are always both below and above the level of the individual: the fragile curves of your lips with the calluses of my hands, the sea scents of your breath with the earth tones of my skin, your airy dreams of nomadic flight and my terrestrial domestic habits. Similarity is not the basis of agreement here, but neither are opposites a principle of attraction. We can never know in advance what multiplicities will agree and together form beautiful, lasting relationships. The procedure of love is to explore and experiment with possible compositions among the multiplicities in each of us.”
This procedural description of love builds upon the writing of Jean Genet, particularly the various ceremonial structures in his writings where relationships are explored and developed.
“In a poem, ordinary words are shifted around in such a way that their usual meaning is enriched by another: the poetic import,” Genet wrote The Miracle of the Rose. “Each of the things, each of the objects that recur to my mind composed a poem.” And the poem takes it meanings from the place where it is enacted, as Genet notes, in the prison “at Mettray, each object was a sign that meant grief.”
Hardt draws directly on Genet’s love “ceremonials” as a possibility for creating livable political institutions bound in —and by— love. So “love is a kind of ritual by which we continually return to those people and things with whom our multiplicities create expansive relations,” he writes:
But this return is not mere repetition. Think of the way we have sex with a familiar lover: I touch you there, then you touch me here, then we do this, and so on until we are done. It is a ritual, a series of habits, but if it were mere repetition the magic would fail. Each return, each encounter, in a ceremonial carries with it the power and mystery of the event. That’s what makes it live. Love conceived of as a ceremonial is thus an institution in the sense that it allows you to return to, prolong, and link together in sequence the encounters you desire.
Or, to quote Genet again: “I refer everything to my system, in which things have an internal signification, and even when I read a novel, the facts without being distorted, lose the meaning which has been given them by the author and which they have for you, and take on another so as to enter smoothly the otherworldly universe in which I live.”
In a sense, Hardt imagines the part Hegel and Marx couldn't (or didn’t) amply theorize, namely, the relationality of the event. In this sense, the unlivability of revolutionary events shouldn't “lead us to close the revolutionary process in the fixed structures of a constituted power, even one aimed at providing 'public happiness' as Condorcet and his revolutionary comrades intended.” Hardt concludes that “love compositions and love ceremonials” are strategies for finding love and making it political and livable.
On his deathbed, he said of a vase of flowers that they were like him: simultaneously alive and dead.
— Guy Davenport on Franz Kafka