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‘To speak of love …’

‘to speak of love is in itself a jouissance’.
Jacques Lacan (Seminar XX: Encore,p. 83).

We have hardly spoken about love, and yet it seems to be all we talk about.

There is perhaps no other phenomena - is it a phenomena? - has the potential to touch all others, to affect and enrol anyone and anything with its gleam or glow. Promiscuous and famously unruly - for what may not be done in name of love? - love justifies, motivates, dances across differences and, perhaps most of all, love promises. Promises a future, tomorrow, otherwise, anew, renewed. Love lets us imagine - a fantasy? - a beyond or outside of the instrumental, the transactional, the zero sum. It arrives untamed - it comes to us without coming from us - and yet, it connects, directs us by making us vulnerable, not just in love, but to love. And yet there is perhaps no other thing - is it a thing? - which is more codified, regulated, moralised, normalised, institutionalised. No other emotion - is it an emotion, one amongst others? - so economised and striated, so artificial, so bound up with the mechanisms of exclusion, abjection, and depersonalisation. Perhaps no other relation - is it a relation, one amongst others? - is so ambivalent, so open to appropriation, so capable of cruelty, so jealous, self-serving, and judgmental. It is not surprising that when it comes to love we are so often silent or, and this is the same thing, so quick to show how love is simply a cover for something else, that it is a ruse, a lie, a strategy, a romantic sugar coating for the bitter tragedy of the real.

Caught then between optimism and tragedy, finely balanced, like the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet - between public and private, day and night, the political and the personal, the general and the singular, the familiar and unfamiliar, law and its transgression, life and death - we want to ask once more, with Juliet, what do we love when we love? And, with Elizebeth Barrett Browning, can we count the ways, today? And, with bell hooks, what could be the radical future or futures of love?

Geographers have contended with love before (Morrison et al. 2013). While still a minor presence, love has welled up in the discipline with attention to care and intimacy (Olson 2015; Pain 2015). Love is also becoming part of how geographers understand political struggle and the potential for ethical and political practice (Marshall 2014; Smith 2012; Thien 2004, Wilkinson 2017). It seems we have found love in various guises: romantic, erotic, maternal, amicable, ontological, object-oriented and animal (see for example Evans 2021, Geoghegan and Hess 2019; Nast 2006; Pande 2014; Waight and Boyer 2018). Alongside such work, we continue to wonder about love, its intermingling with loss, its ambivalence and aporia (Wylie 2009). Whatever has been said about love, it seems we still struggle to speak of it.

In pursuit of this jouissance, we invite responses to this call that speak in various ways of politics, ethics, truth, joy, loss, language, finitude, difference, knowledge, redemption, geography – and love.


Organisers: Paul Harrison (Durham University, UK), Anna Secor (Durham University, UK), Mikko Joronen (Tampere University, Finland).


References
Evans, R. (2021). Critical geographies of love and loss: Relational responses to the death of a spouse in Senegal. Emotion, Space and Society, 39, 100774.
Geoghegan H, Hess A. Object-love at the Science Museum: cultural geographies of museum storerooms. cultural geographies. 2015;22(3):445-465.
Lacan, J. (2011). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX: Encore: 1972-1973. Norton.
Marshall, D. J. (2014). Love stories of the occupation: storytelling and the counter‐geopolitics of intimacy. Area,46(4), 349-351.
Morrison, C. A., Johnston, L., & Longhurst, R. (2013). Critical geographies of love as spatial, relational and political. Progress in Human Geography,37(4), 505-521.
Nast, H. J. (2006). Loving…. whatever: Alienation, neoliberalism and pet-love in the twenty-first century. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies,5(2), 300-327.
Olson, E. (2016). Geography and ethics II: Emotions and morality. Progress in Human Geography, 40(6), 830-838.
Pain, R (2015) Intimate war. Political Geography44(0): 64–73.
Pande, R. (2014). Geographies of marriage and migration: Arranged marriages and South Asians in Britain. Geography Compass,8(2), 75-86.
Smith, S. (2012). Intimate geopolitics: Religion, marriage, and reproductive bodies in Leh, Ladakh. Annals of the Association of American Geographers,102(6), 1511-1528.
Thien, D. (2004). Love’s travels and traces: The ‘impossible’ politics of Luce Irigaray. Geography and gender reconsidered, 43-48.
Waight, E. Boyer, K. (2018) The role of the non-human in relations of care: baby things. cultural geographies; 25(3):459-472.
Wilkinson, E. (2017) On love as an (im)properly political concept. Environment and Planning D; Society and Space35(1) 57-71
Wylie, J. (2009). Landscape, absence and the geographies of love. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,34(3), 275-289.

Non-Presenting Participants