True Love Stories

Abstract

This article attempts to say something about love by examining how love defies being said (or written). One of its early propositions is that we have little choice but to plagiarize love, and the text proceeds by doing just that. But its plagiarism is selective, explicit, and carefully arranged, so that elegant inarticulations of love by Kristeva, Arendt, Geertz, and a host of others shape a determined narrative line. The text moves from writer to writer and from bodies to mystery, not to build an argument, but to pursue a gambit: Perhaps love is constituted in the very impossibility of its articulation. Of course, the inevitable implication is that the article can only succeed by failing. Still, such failures can be redemptive, for love itself suggests the simultaneous admission and defiance of futility—at least, that will be the author’s sort-of conclusion.