Love is evil  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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"Love is evil" is a frequently cited phrase from the 2005 documentary Zizek!.

Context

“What would be my spontaneous attitude toward the universe? It’s a very dark one. The first thesis would have been a kind of total vanity: there is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally, like… ultimately… there are just some fragments, some vanishing things. If you look at the universe, it’s one big void. But then: how do things emerge? Here I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where… the idea… is that the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed.

“I like this idea of spontaneity very much, the fact that it’s not just nothing. Things are out there – it means something went terribly wrong, that what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe: things exist by mistake. And I’m even ready to go to the end and to claim that the only way to counteract this is to assume the mistake and go to the end. And we have a name for this: it’s called love.

“Isn’t love precisely this kind of a cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of ‘I love the world,’ ‘universal love’ – I don’t like the world. Basically, I’m somewhere in between ‘I hate the world’ or ‘I’m indifferent towards it.’ But the whole of reality, it’s just it: it’s stupid. It is out there. I don’t care about it.

Love, for me, is an extremely violent act. Love is not ‘I love you all’ Love means I pick out something…. Even if this something is just a small detail, a fragile individual person, I say ‘I love you more than anything else.’ In this quite formal sense, love is evil.”