Dwelling in vulnerability: Love beyond the event

Keywords: love, nonrelational, nonevent, event, vulnerability, subjectivity
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

What is it to love someone with Alzheimer’s, to dwell in a refrain of absence and re-emergent loss, and to dwell-with that vulnerability? How does such love mobilize, energize, but also persist in woundedness? In this paper, we aim to think of love as something that abides. While much has been made of the transformative event of love – of its power to disrupt and displace, of its capacity to reontologize and redraw subjectivities – we focus rather on its persistence, as a relating to that which will not be subsumed by relationality. We look to love as a slow wounding, considering it in terms of dwelling with the vulnerability of living, thinking of it not in terms of the event but as nonevent. If a geographies of love would describe a certain exposure to the other, then love’s persistence entails dwelling-with that exposure, and all the wounds, disruptions and surprises it offers. Understood this way, vulnerability is not to be mistaken for something passive, but rather is precisely about acting and about making acting vulnerable. Thinking with a series of vignettes – living with Alzheimers, enduring a miscarriage – we consider these loves as something that both wound – exposes, subjects, encroaches, erases, forces, maintains – and offers situated avenues for abiding these wounds through their slowness and durability.