“Love must be reinvented”. This demand comes to us from Rimbaud, from a particular situation occupied by Rimbaud. “Je n’aime pas les femmes. L’amour est ? r?inventer, on le sait”. The phrase appears on the lips of someone, a fictional speaker who can perhaps be identified with Verlaine, who is not a lover of women. What love makes of women, what is left of a woman after love has exacted its price, is in truth not especially lovable: love must be reinvented in order for women, or anybody else for that matter, to be truly capable of giving and receiving love.
Rimbaud’s speaker pronounces a conventional malediction on femininity: “They are incapable of aspiring to anything more than a secure position. Once the position is won, heart and beauty are set aside: there’s nothing left but cold disdain, the daily bread of marriage these days. Or else I see women with potential for happiness, with whom I might have been good friends, gobbled up at once by bullies with all the sensitivity of bonfires”. It’s the same old story: (bourgeois) women are either frigid, grasping bitches, or sensitive fellow-humans who inevitably fall prey to heartless bastards. Why then, between the opening “Je n’aime pas les femmes” and this bitter elaboration, does Rimbaud’s autre insert the demand that love should be reinvented?
The problem at hand is already that of the “new woman”, the woman who is neither chattel nor prey, who slowly takes form throughout the novels of the 19th century before mutating abruptly into the “emancipated” and then “liberated” woman of the feminist polemics of the 20th. For woman to be reinvented, for her to become the “new” or “liberated” woman, entails that love also must be reinvented. Is this, at bottom, a question of changing property relations? Yes and no. Both “love” and “woman” have a role, as concept and category respectively, to play in the ideological mystification of property relations: this is as true now as it was at the start of the 19th century, although true in (mostly) different ways. But the demand for reinvention is first of all a demand for demystification, for the desuturing of “love” from its ideological image and of “woman” from her prescribed economic function.
The wager here is that there is, after all, something to reinvent: that the ideological image of love is a travesty, that the word “love” itself is something other than an ideologeme (although it is always also that). What else could it possibly be? An ideologeme is a word associated with an image or a bundle of images, not necessarily coherent: a word which functions as a shorthand for a set of image-associations. It’s evident that “love” is a very potent ideologeme, as vapid as it is ubiquitous. But a word like “love” also has the function of naming something for which no existing image suffices: a creative and investigative process which has its own way of getting tangled up with the world, discovers its own obstacles and even invents its own symbolism.
Associated with this wager is a second, concerning the amorous capacities of women. If women are human, which no ideological image of womanhood has ever fully conceded, then they are capable of love; which is to say, capable of something other than either scheming for position or passive sexual victimhood. It is a question, if you like, of women’s equality with respect to the processes through which something of reality comes to be registered in human experience: as artists, scientists, political militants and lovers.