"I love to you"

Last night I finished reading chapter 2 of Precarious Life by Judith Butler. I've been waiting to get an opportunity to read it since I was made aware of it's existence last summer. What she discusses in this book is national melancholia in the aftermath of 911. While I'm so done with the discourse surrounding 911 and its aftermath, I love her observations on mourning as a way of reading into the ongoing struggles of Colored people all over the globe. She purports (in academia no less) that the process of mourning is one of loosing the self, because we all depend on each other for identity formation:

"For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the "we" except by finding the way in which I am tied to "you," by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know." (Butler 49)

Butler's observations reminded me on Luce Iragaray's work on Love. In which (and I am paraphrasing generously) she argues that in love humans are longing, very much like the Greek myth of the origins of men, women, and the intersexed, to be bound to one another—that this longing constitutes an infinite search for other and of the true self called love. I wonder then, if this mourning or sense of loss is not akin to this Iragaray’s idea of love—that humans are continuously reaching outward for a sense of inward truth. And that knowing the self is what love is. Now in conversation with professor Hite, this is a project of narcissism and not love. But I would argue is that we would stop searching, and limit our interactions with others if that were the case. Wasn't it Narcissus' curse that let him to only interact with a reflection of himself--rejecting the rest of the world for himself. It was a curse because he no longer remained human but a solitary flower.

Love is an outward reaching process where you seek out yourself through others not only to know yourself, but to understand yourself as human. This mourning we experience when we lose someone is the sense of loss of self--the very realization that we are human--mortals who will cease this intoxicating search (unless one believes in the afterlife, which I do). Love is the journey to self--the fear of death is the fear of never knowing. So on to my own journey, the infinite search of myself in "you" -- loving to "you."