[-empyre-] love on -empyre-, forwarded by Owen Ware

[Nicholas Ruiz III]

forwarded by our guest contributor, Owen Ware:

"Once a discourse is thus driven by its own momentum
into the backwater of the 'unreal', exiled from all
gregarity, it has no recourse but to become the site,
however exiguous, of an affirmation."
  
- Roland Barthes, A Lover?s Discourse

Thirty years after Barthes wrote these words, we must
ask: Can theory carry out this task of affirmation
today?  What conceptual resources are now available to
bring love and its discourse back from exile?   
The resources are multiple: we can speak of the
experience of love (phenomenology), its performative
forces (speech-act theory), its tensions in ethics and
politics (feminism, Marxism, deconstruction).   
But how do these resources become a site of
affirmation?  That is the question - and perhaps the
task - of thinking through the various  
meanings, practices, and performances of love.