If we could open love, we would find there the following:

1) I want you to bestow me to me.
2) I want to bestow you to you.

But if you reciprocate a gift immediately, it won’t be a new gift but the repayment of the one you received. So when the two-sided I-you circuit is closed, one notices that love is not a demand for bestowal but a demand for repayment:

3) I want you to repay me for my bestowal of you to you.

This is why if you don’t respond “I love you” by saying “I love you, too” and instead stare at or thank him/her, this will offend him/her, because to disavow the lover’s demand for repayment is to disavow his/her spiritual-material being.

But if loving is demanding that a gift be repaid, given that the I-you circuit is symmetric, what was initially bestowed can also not be a gift, it can only be the repayment of a previous gift. When we descend to this level, we encounter the following:

4) I want you to repay me to me.
5) I want to repay you to you.

At this level, the gift supposed to be repaid is no longer the signs of love circulating between the lovers, it is the spiritual-material beings of the lovers themselves. Given that every human child is a gift bestowed to the world by his/her mother-father, after it becomes clear that love is not a circulation of gifts but the demand of lovers to repay each other to each other, love gets out of the I-you circuit and propagates towards a familial context. This two-sided repayment process is attended by all relatives dead or alive. A wedding is like a funeral in the sense that marrying the children that you brought to the world is somewhat like repaying them back to the universe that had entrusted them to you.

This is surely not the final point. If you close the I-you circuit once again at this level, there emerges a demand to repay the repayment:

6) I want to repay you for your repayment of me to me.

At this level, we reach the loveless heart of love. Love cannot be love, because you will never be able to identify the gift that you are supposed to repay. This gift to be repaid cannot be anything you had given to your lover, nor can it be your own spiritual-material being, and this regression goes on to infinity; this gift can only be the Big Bang that started the universe. The Relic Radiation that had enveloped us since the year dot is the aura that gives lovelessness an impression of love. What truly constitutes our being is instead the membrane of negation of negation (repayment of repayment) [1].

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] Bkz “The Moon is Split: Scope, Cache, Context”, “Kainatın Ufkunu Kaplayan Gürültü: Yadigar Südur”, “Simgesel Dünyanın Zarı: Yadsımanın Yadsınması”