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huh...i wonder if we are talking about the same thing under the rubric of absolute, then.
at a crass structural level, love leans on an investment of affect in an object--that is in the image of another (investment here in the psychoanalytic sense.)
there is often a kind of transfer of power that follows on this investment: you might link your sense of yourself to the actions of another, whom you do not and cannot control....once this is in place, then all kinds of results can take shape that feel as though they originate from without--which in a sense they do, but only as a function of your own investment and the types of relation to that investment that you bundle together with the emotion you call love (i put it this way because love can mean alot of things)...so because you lay yourself open in this way--you allow the image of another to function as judge. because love is, particularly in its more crush-like phases, caught up with fantasy at many many particular (that is individual) levels, it follows that a structuring feature of this kind of relation is that there may be an assymetry between the image you construct for yourself of the other, as object of your desire, and the person who floats about in that image. being in love would tend to prompt you to downplay such assymetries--but if things (the actual relationship) do not go as you would prefer, those assymetries (gaps) can reveal themselves in very painful ways.
because you put another in a position to effectively make judgements about you--deep emotional judgements--the outcomes of the relationship do in fact come from a space beyond your control--which would make them seem transcendent (not absolute)--but the origin of that transcendence is your own affective investment and the ways in which affect gets knit into an emotional state you call love--a state that brings with it all kinds of specific rules/comportments.
this whole thing is a kind of structural explanation for a type of relation, not an account of love itself. i dont think i could give an account of love. i say this because i feel a bit odd about what i wrote above, which responds to your post, seer, in the context of this thread, but at the same time seems to make a very complex emotional space into something that relies on a kind of hydraulic relation between component parts. thinking in this way about emotions is sometimes strange business.
anyway, i dont see how love could be understood as anything like an absolute.
but like i said, maybe we are talking about different understandings of the term absolute.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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