FRESH IDEAS: The jolt of love and wanting

From The Hedgehog Review: "To love is to be jolted out of the self by the strangeness of another person, and the beloved entrances precisely because of his unutterable difference — the most basic and insuperable absence. He is absent even when he is present because he is other, situated outside of myself: 'But isn't desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn't the object always absent?'

OPINION: We’re against emotionalism, except when we’re not.

"As Roland Barthes reminds us, there are two concepts in Greek for desire, one for the missing someone who's left, and a second for the more curious sensation of missing someone beside me, someone who is with me but who remains less than fully accessible to me: 'Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.'"

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