Love at the Limits: Between the Corporeal and the Incorporeal

Abstract

New materialist frameworks have increasingly repudiated dualistic thinking and challenged representationalist views, which hold that discursive practices mediate our access to the material world (a core tenet of social constructivism). As it has become clear that the material cannot be considered inert, important questions concerning agency, politics and subjectivity have been raised. But while the significance of corporeality has been emphasised, Elizabeth Grosz, in an interview on her most recent book, The Incorporeal (2017), notes that: ‘If materialism(s) cannot account for the immaterial events we experience and articulate, then it has a clear limit that it needs to address.’ An important question this raises in terms of the mutual conditionings of love and one I will address is: How can we account for the immaterial space and time tracings of love without negating the material in the process? To answer this, I turn to Deleuze's The Logic of Sense.