Every Love is Queer

How is it possible to think about love when love is the second runner-up, right after consciousness, to be the primary maker of life? Can we really think about love when it’s so primordial, preceding everything?

I want to ground this question in my everyday experience of love, in loving the other, meeting the other, any ‘other’- including persons, fantasies, dark objects of love, divine objects of love, until they’re no longer objects or other, until we realize that there’s no otherness, that maybe our egos are the other waiting to become transient forms of selves. And then love becomes living our defenses, and then letting go of them until our body-psyches become porous. Love is an assault on structure— a monster who eats away at narratives until they rot and become gooey prima materia ready to become something new. Love is communion with bodies and gods and demons until those bodies and gods and demons become indistinguishable– random portals of entry into one another. To enter a body is to leave your body– it is no wonder that the orgasm is also a little death. Every experience of love is a near-death experience. Every expression of love is a solemn, libidinal ritual of leaving and entering. Eros is Thanatos. Every love is a becoming– becoming other, becoming monster, becoming freak, becoming Kali, becoming hole (with an ‘h’ only). Every love is a re-questioning of the nature of being as we know it. Every communion is a reformulation. Every love is a state of in-betweenness, intermediation, and indetermination. Every love is stateless. Every love is queer.

And this is why love, as a closer encounter with the unscripted Real, is terrifying. That’s why we desire it but simultaneously build arsenals to protect ourselves against it. To enter love is to enter a dream that speaks the indecipherable language of the unconscious. Love speaks truths in gibberish and gives no guarantees. It refuses the question “Where do you see yourself five years from now?”. Love is unseeing paths until you see the path.

Love is the antithesis of capitalism because capitalism is the continual process of the unqueering of life– of sorting, labeling, and indexing the forms of life, living, and loving so they’re prepped for dominion. Civilization-as-capitalism is the chaos that’s engendered by the continual attempt to tame chaos. Patriarchy is the chaos that’s engendered by the continual attempt to tame queerness. Love, chaos, and queerness are the underworld of the capitalist-patriarchal complex and the monsters it wants to slay.

And as such, all queer bodies are war machines, and all queering processes are lines of flight. And if love is queerness reincarnated, or vice versa, then love-as queerness is the ultimate resistance and ultimate revolution. Can we speak of the queerness-love complex as an alternative infrastructure of life, please? The queerness-love process is the productive process par excellence as seen in the infant-breast-mother queer, the farmer-land-rain queer, or the mourner-shadow-memory queer. It’s the only form of productivity that actually produces life. Everything else is pastiche.