The Problem with Love (part 1)
Sade - Beckett - Wagner
When we lose something, it can be just as bewildering to never find it again as it can be to somehow find it in the very first place we look. How, we ask ourselves, could something go missing if it was so ready at hand? If its location was so easy to (accidentally) recall? 18th century French literature recognised the necessary tension between these two poles: when searching for something, we really do expect to search for it. It should not be gone forever, nor should it be too easily found. The very act of searching should, to a certain degree, constitute the object being searched for, and this searched-for x must always and by necessity exist outside of the zone in which we search – it must always and indefinitely be located elsewhere, if the search and the object itself are to coexist. Finding it can be just as vulgar as losing it forever. The essence of the thing looked for should, therefore, be incompatible with the location in which we go looking for it.
In French literature I would claim that there are two variations of this logic, where the goal of our search is always and indefinitely located somewhere else, incompatible with wherever we search for it: the Marquis de Sade and Voltaire.
