Loving Without the Body: The Invention of Post-Affective Love in Contemporary Times

Abstract

After finishing Bioy Casares’s novel The Invention of Morel (1940), one can read between the lines: Faustine is dead, and therefore, I love her. Beyond being a psychological or aesthetic issue, this is fundamentally a political problem. It points to a dilemma concerning power: how do devices capture, administer, and erode the subject’s capacity to love, transforming their aesthetic, erotic, and political experience? This essay explores the political consequences of a subjectivity colonized by digital technologies that prevent the experience of Eros and alterity, condemning it to a virtual simulacrum. For this reason, the essay is framed within postmodern debates on contemporary subjectivity and micropolitics, approached from interdisciplinary perspectives.