Abstract

This dissertation is a set of meditations on love and the sort of necessity and possibility that love bears as an experience. I read both the necessity and the possibility of love as an event of the loss and loosening of self, order, and meaning. That is, I find love's necessity and possibility in the loss and loosening of identity and the systems that author and authorize identity. So love occurs here as an experience of a certain sort of undergoing and going under. Conversion and perversion are developed as two versions of this undergoing/going under event. ;In readings of Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida, each of which is set alongside a memory of Simone Weil, I find the difference between love and violence. My effort is less to describe and interpret that difference--that is, to take it as a theme--than it is to read and write that difference and to find myself taken under and along with it. In that sense, the dissertation is not about love as much as it is offered as a venture and risk with it