Abstract

EMBARGOED – expected end date 27.06.2025 In this thesis, I concentrate on love and ask what it means to experience being in love. I start from the observation that being in love is a confusing experience and defend the claim that experiencing confusion when in love is inevitable. I hold that this confusion is the result of love having a dual nature; in a single movement love can be both pleasure and pain. Love's duality necessitates that love exists in the space between these opposed states, such that ambiguity and contradiction are inherent to love's nature. As a result, being in love will always be confusing because tension is built into the erotic phenomenon. Hence, love’s contradictory movement cannot be explained away and instead is to be welcomed. Acknowledging this point, lovers are to respond by being susceptible to love's tensions and movement in order that they become transformed by love and have an ever evolving and erotically inspiring relationship, as opposed to being unreceptive to love, remaining frozen in their self-satisfied identities and having an erotically uninspiring relationship. To argue for this position, the first part of the thesis focuses on Sappho’s ‘sweetbitter’ coinage to begin to draw out the way in which love can be understood as a tension. The second and most substantial part of the thesis focuses on three of Plato’s symposiasts, Aristophanes, Socrates and Alcibiades, whose speeches will be used to describe how love moves in such a way that it leads to conflicting outcomes for lovers. The third part of the thesis concentrates on Luce Irigaray’s concept of the ‘interval’ in order to demonstrate how movement is entailed in love. I contend that love, with its inherent dilemma, is not in need of reinvention; it is exactly what it should be.