Yann Dall'Aglio on love

March 3, 2023

(According to Wikipedia)

"Yann Dall'Aglio writes about love in the modern era and he defines love as the desire of being desired.

He has a TED Talk from 2012 called Love — you're doing it wrong.

Quotes / Transcript

Therefore, only another desiring conscience can conceive me as a desirable being. I know this, that's why love can be defined in a more accurate way as the desire of being desired. Hence the eternal problem of love: how to become and remain desirable?

The individual used to find an answer to this problem by submitting his life to community rules. You had a specific part to play according to your sex, your age, your social status, and you only had to play your part to be valued and loved by the whole community.

But a phenomenon started in the 13th century, mainly in the Renaissance, in the West, that caused the biggest identity crisis in the history of humankind. This phenomenon is modernity.

Now individuals are free to value or disvalue any attitude, any choice, any object. But as a result, they are themselves confronted with this same freedom that others have to value or disvalue them. In other words, my value was once ensured by submitting myself to the traditional authorities. Now it is quoted in the stock exchange.

On the free market of individual desires, I negotiate my value every day. Hence the anxiety of contemporary man. He is obsessed: "Am I desirable? How desirable? How many people are going to love me?" And how does he respond to this anxiety? Well, by hysterically collecting symbols of desirability.

I call this act of collecting, along with others, seduction capital. Indeed, our consumer society is largely based on seduction capital. It is said about this consumption that our age is materialistic. But it's not true! We only accumulate objects in order to communicate with other minds. We do it to make them love us, to seduce them.

Nothing could be less materialistic, or more sentimental, than a teenager buying brand new jeans and tearing them at the knees, because he wants to please Jennifer. Consumerism is not materialism. It is rather what is swallowed up and sacrificed in the name of the god of love, or rather in the name of seduction capital.

In light of this observation on contemporary love, how can we think of love in the years to come? We can envision two hypotheses: The first one consists of betting that this process of narcissistic capitalization will intensify.

But such a future doesn't have to be.

Another path to thinking about love may be possible. But how? How to renounce the hysterical need to be valued? Well, by becoming aware of my uselessness. Yes, I'm useless. But rest assured: so are you.

This uselessness is easily demonstrated, because in order to be valued I need another to desire me, which shows that I do not have any value of my own. I don't have any inherent value.

It is because I want to be loved from head to toe, justified in my every choice, that the seduction hysteria exists. And therefore I want to seem perfect so that another can love me. I want them to be perfect so that I can be reassured of my value. It leads to couples obsessed with performance who will break up, just like that, at the slightest underachievement.

In contrast to this attitude, I call upon tenderness — love as tenderness.

To be tender is to accept the loved one's weaknesses. It's not about becoming a sad couple of caretakers. On the contrary, there's plenty of charm and happiness in tenderness.

I refer specifically to a kind of humor of self-mockery. For a couple who is no longer sustained, supported by the constraints of tradition, I believe that self-mockery is one of the best means for the relationship to endure.