March 24th, 2009

The only perfect love is love for an imperfect object, for any object. And then the paradox, of course, is that the one great equalizer, the one real universal, is death. So in order to truly love your neighbor, you must forget all his qualities, all that makes him a specific human being, which means that you must treat him as if he is already dead. And my thesis is that this is something which comes very close to intolerance towards the Other, because basically what Kierkegaard is saying is that you should forget the particular idiosyncrasy of the Other’s enjoyment. You must abstract it; you must love the other as reduced to the empty universality of death. What death stands for here is the erasure of enjoyment, of the substance of enjoyment. It’s just the abstract Other.

- Slavoj Zizek, 2002