Without realizing it, that university seminar two decades ago had given birth to the still-unformed idea for this project on love. We were discussing the ways in which love is represented.  From Henry Miller’s letters to Anaïs Nin, I learned the vocabulary of love. That love can be ambivalent and exists as a phenomenological entity beyond context, I learned from a migrant woman who cared for another woman’s children as if they were her own, while her own children were in the custody of her own mother, in her very faraway country. At that moment, Simmel could explain love to me as allowing oneself to be affected by and to affect another being beyond—or in spite of—power hierarchies.

 

¿All you need is love or Amar Amando?

    Wouldn’t it be better to speak of loving rather than of love as a noun, given that the latter seems possible to grasp only in its absence?

And finally: when we speak of love, are we speaking only of romantic love? It is true that there is a fascination and an aura of longing mixed with suspicion that surrounds love: to fall in love, as an inevitable or uncontrollable interaction with the self. What else is there that we do not name regarding love?

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Amar Amando - from Spanish To love by loving -  or to love by not loving, shifts the quest of the imagination to reality—says Bell Books—from the ideal to the realm where bodies, beings, and things dwell, with their wounds and their care.

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