There is, in the middle of Shoplifters, the film by Hirokazu Kore-eda, a moving scene, which constitutes the turning point: it is the moment when this family of marginalized, blended family here and there, decides to keep with her little Yuri, after understanding the abuse she suffered in her family of origin. While Sakura Andô combs her after the bath, she then explains to her what may seem obvious: “If someone hits you and tells you that he does it because he loves you, he’s a liar . »
This simple idea is one of the starting points of the reflection of bell hooks (she insisted on lowercase letters, as a way of putting forward her ideas more than her person) in All About Love: New Visions, published in 2000, not yet translated (!), and which prances since the death of the author in December 2021 in the front runners of the best sales across the Atlantic: it is within the family of origin that, from the earliest age, the the line blurs between neglect and comfort, petty humiliation and encouragement, abuse and care, between discipline and punishment. This is where the absolute lie of this sentence that supposedly justifies everything sets in: “I”m doing this because I love you.” then in place a chain destined to perpetuate itself, which Simone Weil defines in an implacable way when she explains that pain and suffering are a kind of currency that passes from hand to hand until one day arriving at someone who receives them and keeps them to himself, and manages not to pass them on anymore.
But it’s not just the community of origin. It is the whole of today’s culture, particularly that of the millennials, which is more generally cynical on the question of love, “and that cynisism has come from the pervasive feeling that love cannot be found” (“et ce cynicism comes from the pervasive feeling that love cannot be found”*). Talking about love with intensity can be seen as weak, irrational, or corny, even if the resulting fear of love is only the mask of betrayed hearts. In support of his developments, hooks quotes extensively from major contemporary essays, including the 1981 classic When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Rabbi Harold Kushner: “(…) they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment. They will be so fearful of the pain of disappointment that they will forgo the possibilities of love and joy. (“(…) they will grow up seeking intimacy without risk, pleasure without significant emotional investment. They will be so fearful of the pain of disappointment that they will forgo the possibilities of love and joy.”* )
By making the need to please and seduce one of the foundations of social functioning, amplified today by social networks, and the need to first please others the source of all gratification, it is the whole system which first promotes lying to oneself, so much so that pleasing ends up cutting off one’s own feelings. The battle that is engaged is then first between oneself and oneself, to live with integrity, according to one’s convictions and one’s deep feelings, and to aspire to an intimate peace which is the first condition of availability.
But then “love”, verb or noun? The question arises formally only in English, but basically in all languages, and it is always the same key and the same distinction: to love is an intention but above all an action, an active will to surpass oneself with the aim of favoring in the same movement one’s own development and that of others, and a mutual growth, which can cover a spiritual dimension. We then go from “I think I’m in love” (“I think I’m in love”*) to “I am loving” (“I love”*). Think about it: if love is an action (or a participatory emotion, which comes to the same thing), an action that no one is forced to do, then we immediately become responsible and accountable, as equals. That there is no love but that there are proofs of love is the only way to straighten out the impasse on which the “falling in love” leads, the “fall in love”, this fall which indicates everything at the same time a fear, a fascination and a stupefaction.
In her first novel The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, Toni Morrison stigmatized romantic love as “one of the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought”. human thought”*), romantic love, that is to say the idea that one comes to love without will and without the ability to choose, and which screens out the possibility of loving actively.
These valuable insights may now sound like certainties, but bell hooks was among the first to formulate them. They lead to one of his major theses: the first victims of patriarchy as it is perpetuated by men, but also by sexist mothers, are young boys, who are taught from a very tender age not to cry, not to express their pain, their feelings, their loneliness or their suffering, and in the end to hide their true feelings. This is the source of major dysfunctions, this lie to oneself which later develops into a lie to their partners, and which is the source of adults cut off from their own emotions, self-centered and masking their inner emptiness.
Love is a choice against the fear of the other, the fear of difference, which then no longer becomes a threat but a chance, a chance to find oneself in what is not oneself. It’s that there are no desert islands, no one is alone on Mars. We are not alone.
How much, not in fact how I love you, I could tell you the ways, tell you the ways. Show you the whys. Tell you them because. Because.
*our translation
There is, in the middle of Shoplifters, the film by Hirokazu Kore-eda, a moving scene, which constitutes the turning point: it is the moment when this family of marginalized, blended family here and there, decides to keep with her little Yuri, after understanding the abuse she suffered in her family of origin. While Sakura Andô combs her after the bath, she explains to her…