Marcus Steinweg, on The Aporias of Love

Marcus Steinweg, in his book Aporien der Liebe (Aporias of Love, 2010), says that the aporias of love are conditions of its possibility, insofar as love means resistance to narcissistic self-mirroring and self-enclosure and openness to indeterminacy and otherness. Love is aporetic, because it is both singular and universal, and because it exposes the lovers to the conflict between uniqueness and structuring convention, and between singularity and universality.
      According to Steinweg, there are at least five aporias (insoluble problems) belonging to the experience of love: (1) the aporia of emptiness, (2) the aporia of happiness, (3) the aporia of hyperbolism, (4) the aporia of intensity, and (5) the aporia of the impossible.
      The aporia of emptiness is that the lover feels an emptiness in the absence of his beloved, and yet this absence is also the ground of possibility for another encounter between the lover and his beloved.
      The aporia of happiness is that, as difficult as it is not to expect happiness from love, those who free themselves from this expectation may be the most likely persons to be happy.
      The aporia of hyperbolism is that love may become a kind of fever that drives us to reach beyond ourselves, opening us to the presence of the Other. Rather than promoting greater consistency and stability, love may take us through peaks and valleys of experience.
      The aporia of intensity is that love may be an experience of something that eludes us and is beyond us and yet is capable of being experienced.
      The aporia of the impossible is that for love, the possible and the impossible (like reality and ideality) are pseudo-alternatives, because every love creates its own aporias. Love is situated in the aporetic compossibility of finitude and infinity, and the aporia is also revealed by the unity in which the finite singularity of lovers encounters the infinite universality of love.¹ 
      Still another aporia is that of the "who" and the "what" of love. Do we love someone because of who they are as a whole person or because of the particular qualities (such as attractiveness and intelligence) they possess? The blindness of love may consist in our being willing to lose sight of the "what" in order to affirm the "who."² 
      Still another aporia is that to affirm the Other as constitutive of oneself is also to affirm the inconsistency or incompleteness of oneself without the Other and the incommensurability of oneself with the Other as Other.
      Other aporias of love include those of reason and unreason, presence and absence, and immanence and transcendence.

FOOTNOTES

¹Marcus, Steinweg, Aporien der Liebe (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2010), p. 15.

²Ibid., p. 38.