Love is Strong as Death

The following bits of texts were reprinted in subRosa's invitation to the Feast, in order to stimulate dialog and responses to the idea of Political Love.

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Marx defined the origin of man’s exploitation of man as man’s exploitation of woman and asserted that the most basic human exploitation lies in the division of labor between man and woman. Why didn’t he devote his life to solving the problem of this exploitation? He perceived the root of all evil but he did not treat it as such. Why not? The reason, to some extent, lies in Hegel’s writings, especially in those sections where he deals with love. Hegel being the only Western philosopher to have approached the question of love as labor. It is therefore entirely appropriate for a woman philosopher to start speaking of love. It results from the need to think and practice what Marxist theory and practice have thus far ignored, giving rise to merely piecemeal economic and cultural developments which can no longer satisfy us.

LUCE IRIGARAY, I love to you, p 19

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People today seem to be unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude. The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions. ...We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing.

MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, p. 351–352

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Poetry speaks to the immediate wound.

JOHN BERGER

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I bear equally with you

The black permanent separation.

Why are you crying? Rather give me your hand,

Promise to come again in a dream.

You and I are a mountain of grief.

You and I will never meet on this earth.

If only you could send me at midnight

A greeting through the stars.

ANNA AKHMATOVA

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Love aims to close all distance. Death achieves the same end. Yet whereas love celebrates the unique, the unrepeatable: death destroys them. ... Love aims to close all distances. Yet if separation and space were annihilated neither loved one nor lover would exist. Between space and love there is the first opposition—that opposition which is contained as energy within the original act of creation.

JOHN BERGER, our faces my heart, brief as photographs, p. 90

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In the segregated South those black and white folks who struggled together for racial justice (many of whom grounded their actions not in radical politics but in religious conviction) were bound by a shared belief in the transformative power of love. Understanding that love was the antithesis of the will to dominate and subjugate, we allowed that longing to know love, to love one another, to radicalize us politically. That love was not sentimental. It did not blind us to the reality that racism was deeply systemic and that only by realizing that love in concrete political actions that might involve sacrifice, even the surrender of one’s life, would white supremacy be fundamentally challenged. We knew the sweetness of beloved community.

BELL HOOKS, Killing Rage, p. 265

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Posted by subRosa at 01:57 PM | Permalink

To introduce myself on this blog and to initiate a conversation, I first of all want to speak about the moment of beginning. As I write this at the end of a long, task-filled day, I feed myself with a light white wine and with fresh bread and goat cheese I have bought at the farmer’s market today. I try to treat myself well as part of an every-day politics of self-care, and maintaining a viable life—a life worth living.

When Hyla Willis, my subRosa partner, and I first visited the Brown University campus after being invited to contribute a work to the Installation show (In Transit: From Object to Site) we noticed a clocktower, the “Carrie Tower” in a corner of the College Green. It was commissioned and dedicated by one of the Founders of Brown to his wife Carrie, and bore the inscription: “Love is Strong As Death.” This well-known quote from the Song of Songs of the Old Testament became our inspiration. We wanted to make a work that was contingent, not monumental, not “lasting”, but vulnerable, risky, fragile yet strongly desiring--as life itself. The political landscape of the world is horrifying, the US war governs the nations, wreaking havoc, death, famine and pestilence. In the name of democracy unspeakable acts are perpetrated daily on women, children, soldiers, animals, nature, and cities. What is a democracy that demands such atrocities and hate? How can such means ever create viable civic life? Who cares for the mothers, the children, the youth forced into armed service, the animals and plants slaughtered, the cities bombed and burned? In the face of this how can we assert that Love is Strong as Death? How can we even mention the word “love” in the name of which terrible betrayals and violence on a personal and public level are done every day?

subRosa discussed our project with these questions in mind. We thought about Luce Irigaray’s writing about friendship and love between women and the need for civic rights for women and children. We thought about Judith Butlers’ recent writing about gender violence, and what makes a viable life, a life worth living. We thought about the practices of hosting, welcoming difference, welcoming the stranger, that we had learned about from our own collective artistic practice, from friends like Irina Aristarkhova, and from feminists like bell hooks and Audrey Lord. subRosa has tried to ground its practice in ideas about conviviality, desire, pleasure, and welcoming difference. We decided to make our work at Brown a kind of image of our practice. We would invite people from the University and the surrounding community, as well as from subRosa’s larger network of female affiliation, to join us in a discursive, performative, embodied experience of welcoming, hosting, conviviality and discourse expanding on the topic of “Love is Strong as Death.”

From that moment of beginning the project, everything we did became part of the project: Making invitations, compiling lists of addresses, emailing with friends and strangers; inviting people to help us; finding a feminist organic farmer to supply the food; arranging accommodation for traveling friends, thinking about the form of the feast, the menu, researching and reading, meeting with people at Brown. The project has moved from object to site to action or performance.

After some internal conversations with a few friends, we are now ready to open the blog conversation to participation. We wish to engage in a thoughtful, unrepressed, and critical conversation about love and friendship, the differences between them, how they might have very different meanings for women than for men, how sisterhood may be a very different model than brotherhood, how the concept of a “politics of friendship” can be an act of political love, how democracy and a viable civic/civil life can be brought about when there is such war on difference; and how does our practice change us and teach us?

We invite you to participate.

(Faith Wilding, subRosa)

We have linked this project to a project begun 3 years ago by Irina Aristarkhova and Faith Wilding. It is an on-going project in which we try to interrogate our ideas and practice of friendship as a shared and public project, as well as offering a testimony to the fact that friendship between women is possible (we hope). The short text below was written to introduce the on-line conversation between Irina and Faith.

Introduction to Irina Aristarkhova and Faith Wilding’s Project: Love and Friendship: The Spaces Between Us. Exhibited in “Windstoesse”(Windgusts), Kunsthaus, Dresden, 2003:

Friendship and Love are among the cornerstones of our existence (AT LEAST THEY SHOULD BE?) Friendship is the ideal mixture of closeness and distance and promises continuity, acceptance THROUGH SINCERITY, solidarity THROUGH RESPECT FOR DIFFERENCE beyond instrumentalized bonds (such as marriage, work partnerships, etc. )LOVE EVOKES SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS AND INTIMATE, HIDDEN AND UNCONDITIONAL. BOTH ARE CULTURALLY SPECIFIC AND HENCE POSE A QUESTION OF LOCAL SENSIBILITIES AND OPENNESS TO WONDER. However, are the conditions for love and friendship still the same in these days of extreme mobility, travel, migration, virtual connections, gender turmoil, sexual competition, and continuous reinvention of identity? (SUBJECTIVITY INSTEAD OF IDENTITY? –FOR VARIOUS REASONS, SO AS TO KEEP THE DOOR OPEN TO DIFFERENCE, NOT ONLY TO IDENTIFICATION)? Yes, subjectivity then.

Irina Aristarkhova & Faith Wilding
Spaces Between Us

Posted by Faith Wilding at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"Love is Strong as Death" is inscribed on the Carrie Tower, a memorial clock at Brown University.

What does that mean to me as I read it while walking across the busy college green of an ivy league university? Not knowing its origins, it is little more than a sentimental riff realized by a moneyed person.

Growing up, I was not indoctrinated--as a believer--in any singular biblical canon or organized religious faith. So, thanks to my friend Faith, I quickly learned during my first visit to Brown that "Love is Strong as Death" is taken from the Song of Solomon.

I can now make the bold presumption that the people whose money erected the tower were most likely of Judeo-Christian faith. (this is not necessarily true of the brick-layers or stone carvers or students who pass the tower today, although it most likely is).

Who was this Solomon/Suleyman? Did he author the Song of Songs? His name means "peace" - did his assigned name influence how he lived and loved and expressed power? Is it possible to discuss the literary or historical possibilities of Solomon without becoming entrenched in politically correct debate of contemporary realities realities realities in the Middle East or of hetero-normative marriage?

I don't know if I agree that Love is Strong as Death. I suppose both can be corporeal or emotional states as well as political conditions. I wonder how Carrie Brown would have addressed this song?

What if Love were a culture of the shared journey before Death?

Posted by Hyla Willis at 10:21 PM | Permalink

Love aims to close all distance. Death achieves the same end. Yet whereas love celebrates the unique, the unrepeatable: death destroys them. ...Love aims to close all distances. Yet if separation and space were annihilated neither loved one nor lover would exist. Between space and love there is the first opposition--that opposition which is contained as energy within the original act of creation.

-John Berger, our faces my heart, brief as photographs, p. 90

Posted by subRosa at 05:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

subRosa invites you to prepare a gift of discourse reponding to the phrase Love is Strong as Death addressing ideas about the politics of friendship between women, and how acts of political love could be activated and embodied as new possibilities in our lives, in the surrounding community, in the world...

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subRosa, a feminist art collective,
hails you and invites you to come and sit
at our table in friendship, to feast with us
and other friends and strangers.

Love is Strong as Death: A Convivial Feast

Friday, September 15, 2006, 7:00–9:00 pm
On the Covered Balcony of the List Art Center, 2nd floor
Department of Visual Arts, Brown University
64 College St., Providence, RI

R . S . V. P .
no later than Midnight, September Thirteenth
by email: subrosafeast @ refugia . net

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The Feast will be prepared by subRosa and friends using local, organic foods and wines [insofar as possible]. You will join 13 wise women (and those willing to identify as/with women) as honored guests at our table.

We invite you to listen, respond, and prepare a gift of discourse that responds to the texts and ideas we have presented here, and/or to the phrase: Love is Strong as Death addressing ideas about the politics of friendship between women, and how “acts of political love” could be activated and embodied as new possibilities in our lives, on campus, in the surrounding community, in the world.

We encourage you to hail each other at the table in friendship, to deliver encomiums, to share the concerns of your creative and intellectual work, and to engage in a common discourse.

Colors, breathing, touch, taste and sound are all important. Please dress in a festive and comfortable manner. Please let us know in advance via email if you plan to attend. We will seat and feed as many as possible who R.V.V.P.

Our models for this Feast include Plato’s Symposium; bell hooks’ affirmations of difference in “beloved community”; and other feminist traditions of hosting, hospitality, collaborative cooking, nourishment and consciousness-raising as sites for critical conviviality.

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Join the conversation via our blog:
www.refugia.net/subrosafeast

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Love is Strong as Death: A Convivial Feast
is funded by the Department of Visual Arts at Brown University,
as part of “In Transit: From Object to Site,” Sept. 9–Oct. 23, 2006
at the David Winton Bell Gallery.

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subRosa describes our work as “an art of social relations developed around critical issues of feminist concern.” Our “installation” for the List Art Center takes the form of a performance of hosting, critical conviviality, and interdisciplinary knowledge creation. We are inspired by questions: Is it possible to create an embodied intellectual and affective communion with strangers and friends in a public venue? How do we prepare for this communion? How do we instigate and nurture reciprocity and participation? What do we desire to receive, and what is our “gift?” Can a liberal education teach political love? What are political acts of love?

On one corner of the Campus Green sits a clock tower, erected in honor of “Carrie” by her husband. Carrie Brown was granddaughter of Nicholas Brown, for whom the University is named. The (mostly male) founders and presidents of Brown have always been supported by the conviviality and affective labor of women such as Carrie, to whom the clock tower is dedicated with the inscription “Love is Strong as Death” (after Song of Solomon).

subRosa takes the title of our project from this tower, with the intent to re-cast its site-u-ational meaning with new & historic manifold possibilities.

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Posted by subRosa at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)