Adorno/Assael 2

Steven Assael, "Skye and Marney" (2001)



"If love in society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntariness that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it. Loving mean not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counterpressure. He alone loves who has the strength to hold fast to love. Even though social advantage, sublimated, preforms the sexual impulse, using a thousand nuances sanctioned by the order to make now this, now that person seem seriously attractive, an attachment once formed opposes this by persisting where the force of social pressure, in advance of all the intrigues the latter then takes into its service, does not want it....The love, however, which in the guise of unreflecting spontaneity and proud of its alleged integrity, relies exclusively on what it takes to be the voice of the heart, and runs away as soon as it thinks it can no longer hear that voice, is in this supreme independence precisely the tool of society."
-Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia #110 (1951)