“Love is a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes that ranges from interpersonal affection (“I love my mother”) to pleasure (“I loved that meal”). It can refer to an emotion of a strong attraction and personal attachment. Love can also be a virtue representing human kindness, compassion, and affection—”the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another”. It may also describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, one’s self or animals”
Above is the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page on Love. Probably one of the most direct attempts at being a definition of such an abstract concept that language fails to capture. Sandoval discusses the idea of looking at love as a Hermenutic. That is using love as method of interpretation and the extension beyond the border of identity. In some sense love would then act as simply a way of seeing differently. Love can then act as this “unachievable end”. An ideal to work towards that may never be truly reachable (given that it is nearly impossible to truly define). The way we chase after love offers a nice parallel into how it may be best to approach to political agendas and the pursuit of rights.
Where this idea may fail comes when the need for something more concrete becomes apparent. In order to rally around something those in support won’t want something as abstract as love to be the end goal. I feel there has to exist some happy medium between abstraction and specifics. That is, somewhere in that space between exists a point at which people will feel comfortable rallying around it but also don’t feel restricted.
When it comes to love from my own individual subjectivity, at this moment it in my life, my own inner definition seems to be ever changing as the atmosphere and point in my life that I am in also acts as a sort of limbo space (that we refer to as college). While there’s a more apparent love for family, friends, this city, and others there also exists the love that was and the love that grows. Falling in and out of love becomes a way for the definition of what love is to oneself to grow. As someone who studies language the idea of and word “love” fascinates me in how it attempts to encapsulates so much, possibly more than any other word describing an abstract concept, and yet tends to never quite do the job correctly. Almost as if the word itself acts as a means to, again, an unachievable end. There are so many different types of love and yet we choose to use the same word to describe them all (I’d be curious to see if there are languages out there that have more terms for various more common types of love). Perhaps all these ideas of how the word and concept acts in our lives can be applied to looking at and using love as a political idea.
