Collective love and solidarity are for the most part associated with the life-sustaining feeling of happiness, joy, and fulfillment. What if such an association is an illusion that actually threatens collective love and solidarity? Love doesn’t make you happy; it requires genuine caring, effort, self-sacrifice, and the ability to share the pain and suffering of others. It hurts and destroys you, bringing you closer to death rather than making you more alive.
Julie Reshe, an author of Koine.Community, a Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis of the Global Center for Advanced Studies, discusses “the virus of love and death” in a lecture that is availible here.
Picture: “Christ in hell” (after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1561)