Before That Love Celestial: Distance
This is the first of a three part series on love and distance.
While scrolling through YouTube (and I know you do it too!), I stumbled upon a song from one arguably my favourite synthpop act The Midnight entitled “Comet”, which was redone by Night Habit and paired with footage from Richard Linklater’s famous film Before Sunrise.
Because of the pairing, what was presented was the all too familiar love song, given a more personal focus due to Linklater’s virtually exclusive focus on the couple at the center of the Before…Trilogy of films. At the same time, however, this all too familiar format was made strange by The Midnight’s incorporation of the planets and the stars as allegories of human love. The greater the distance between them, the greater the intimacy.
It was this interpolation of intimacy of personal love expressed by two human bodies and the reminders of the vastness distances between us and the cosmos manifested in the heavenly bodies that I found fascinating, and indeed moving.
In the first instance, what I saw and heard was a musical expression of what Byung Chul Han called in The Agony of Eros as the “negativity of otherness”. This phrase can be understood as the metaphysical distance between oneself and another (whether that another is a person, animal, plant or object), which Han argued was not a barrier to knowledge and intimacy. Instead, he proposed that this negativity of distance between one and another is an indispensable precondition for knowing, and indeed loving, anything and anyone (I explore this in greater detail in A Theological Engagement with Pornography. In Alain Badiou’s words, “the negativity of the otherness…is constitutive of erotic experience”.
Interestingly, Han uses a planetary example of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia to illustrate this “negativity of otherness”. In the movie, the film’s protagonist, the melancholic and depressive Justine, undergoes an awakening in the face of an incoming collision of a planet named Melancholia. Han uses the this cinematic motif of the distance between person and planet as an illustration of the negativity of otherness. More specifically, Han speaks of the awakening of erotic love within Justine, as “she awaits the approaching catastrophe as joyous union with her beloved” (4).
As both these movies and the music video show, it is precisely this negativity of otherness, that primordial distance between one and another, that constitutes the ground in which truly erotic love may blossom.
At the same time, however, what tugged at the heartstrings in this schema was the way in which keeping such love alive meant keeping the distance of otherness open, and never closing that distance through what is longed for within the space of this distance, namely its closure through passionate embrace. The planets for the likes of Han and the Midnight thus become enduring allergories of love precisely because they remain out of our reach.
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