Love In-Between

Laura Candiotto,Hanne De Jaegher

doi:10.1007/s10892-020-09357-9

Love In-Between

Laura Candiotto, Hanne De Jaegher

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-020-09357-9

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Abstract

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on Irigaray’s account of love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation.

Highlights

We put forward an enactive approach to love as participatory sense-making, inspired by the “I love to you” of the Belgian-born French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (1996)
Emancipating from an abstract concept of love that regulates the lovers’ practices, the enactive approach sees the continuous process of building the meaning of
We argue that the dialectic generation of meanings, concerns and values is embodied and embedded, even at the intersubjective level of participatory sense-making

Summary

Introduction

We put forward an enactive approach to love as participatory sense-making, inspired by the “I love to you” of the Belgian-born French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (1996). Enaction—an embodied approach to cognition and mind—sees living beings as continually engaged in making sense: from the most basic sensing and interacting with energetic and material conditions of existing, which even bacteria and plants do, to humans’ most elevated endeavours like writing poetry, doing science, acting ethically (Colombetti 2014a, b; Di Paolo et al 2017, 2018; Gallagher 2017; Thompson 2007; Varela et al (2016/1991). Participatory sense-making theory established that social understanding rests on individual sense-making activities (fundamentally related to the processes of living self-maintenance) and on the social interaction processes that emerge between people (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007; De Jaegher et al 2010).

I Love to You

The Ethics of Love as Participatory Sense‐Making