really nice writing from slavoj zizek
In his foreword to the Verso edition of Adorno's In Search Of Wagner, Zizek has a lovely paragraph on love, in relation to the works of Wagner. I'll paraphrase it here:
The message of true love is thus: even if you are everything to me, I can survive without you, I am ready to forsake you for my mission or profession. The proper way for the lover to test the other's love is thus to betray him at the crucial moment of his career - only if he can survive the ordeal, and successfully accomplish his task although deeply traumatized, will he deserve love. The underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal - it should retain the status of a by-product, of something we receive as an undeserved grace.