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Hollowed Out 23 “Half past twelve: how the time has gone by.”1 You are obviously not coming ; or you are here cocooned from sight in another dimension, where time and space retain their qualitative aspects of east and west, before and after. Either way, as with the recently departed, the time is approaching when it is ceasing to make sense to speak in the second person, as if you are in earshot . After writing about love in the third person, Jean-Luc Nancy added a postlude, wondering whether love could only ever be talked about between two people, in a letter. Shouldn’t a discourse on love “be at the same time a communication of love, a letter, a missive, since love sends itself as much as it enunciates itself”? Our situation means reversing that change of voice, switching to the third person. Related to the impersonal form of address is the royal “we,” as when I write “one” or “our,” in both cases invoking an imaginary community of shared opinion, an ideal political or consensus or shared method of analysis. But this is not to give up; it could be to find a way to mobilize a discourse about meeting. Of course, the third person would have to be animated, but this may be exactly what Eros, classically known as the Public Worker, does, mobilizing a movement form that has no other purpose than to bring people together. According to Jean-Luc Nancy, I should be glad that you did not arrive. “Love arrives, it comes, or else it is not love. But it is thus that it endlessly goeselsewherethanto‘me’whowouldreceiveit:itscomingisonlyadeparture for the other, its departure only the coming of the other.”2 The crossing envisaged here seems to resist positive representation, for it is at best the mise-en-scène of a love whose fulfilment is “impossible,”3 whose rendezvous is always missed.4 Should I rejoice that some malfunction of the turnstile , or the late decision of a stationmaster to redirect your train to another 24 hollowed out platform, caused you to slip past me, into outer space? It avoided the doubled life that must have ensued once we embarked upon our deception. Those postcards with their cryptically allegorical images, the phone calls woven into the routine of les proches, those disturbing moods: all of these symptoms of “missing you” could have been reunited with the stereotypes of fiction. In this nonmeeting I met the love that is a stranger to stained sheets and peeling windowsills. Transcendental, always imminent, always hopeful, always midstride, it leaps over the lines. The gaze of Eros and his family may be on the horizon, on the beyond that situates the present, but the horizon can be close to home. It can be the interval between two people, provided it is understood that this has an existence in its own right and can never be closed, even though the dimensions of the envelope may vary. “To overcome his victim, Eros resorts to his favourite medium: not touch or caresses, but one that operates from a distance: namely, the gaze that, fixing the desired subject, now creates another subject, the one who inspires that desire.”5 Beauty implies a third person, but so does Eros. Even when I am waiting for you, I am waiting for someoneelse,theidealizationdistilledfromlettersandtelephonecalls.The couple, no less than the solitary self-pleasurer, imagines an absent partner. It is this additional imagined witness that lends the private act its erotic aura. Without this figure, approving or masterful, distant and implacable or jealous and insatiable, sex would not be secret. It would be a transaction as public and blameless as going to the theatre. He or she is not simply the idealization of a real person—or their reduction to a key trait, a graceful step,asparklingeye—butafigureorotherwhopredatesyou, whowasborn perhaps with the first awareness of being alone in a world without meaning . Beauty summons because the world is without destination. Beauty is attractive because it provides a sense of direction. Eros is not simply an onlooker. It may be the name of space as such when it is felt to be looking at you—addressing you. This Argus-eyed environment might be the total circuit of God’s creation, the eternity that the religious poet Thomas Traherne glimpsed, “Like a great Ring of pure and endless light.” For someone seduced by sin to flee the loving God, it might consistof“labyrinthineways”and“titanicgloomsofchasmedfears.”6 Atany rate...

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