Love — What Love Is Not

An extract of a Krishnamurti talk approaches love by a series of removals, the procedure the wiki reads in Dissociations. This page follows the removals, sets them against notes in the vault, and reads a 1993 pop song as the case the procedure would predict.

The talk's procedure

The source is the caption track of a YouTube excerpt from a talk by Jiddu Krishnamurti (Krishnamurti — What Is Love? (extract)). The inquiry is given in one sentence:

So we are going to see what it is not, and therefore come upon what it is.

Searching out love is already too much, and cultivating it is worse, because cultivation is a movement of thought:

Therefore it is not a question of searching out love, nor cultivating love — how can you cultivate love? All cultivation is the product of the mind, product of thought; it is like a mind that pursues humility, it says, I know vanity and I must cultivate humility. And when the mind that is proud and vain, cultivates humility, it is still vain.

Any positive programme for love fails in the same way, through the apparatus that runs it. The removal is not to be received from a teacher either; the listener performs it while the talk runs:

So what we are going to do is to find out what it is not, not through me, not through the speaker at all, but by listening to yourself and finding out what it is not […] and if it is not that, wipe it away instantly. If you don't wipe it, if it doesn't disappear, then you are caught in time, you are a slave to the word and the verb to be. And therefore there is no love.

Krishnamurti's slavery is to the fixed name, the "this is jealousy" or "this is love" that arrests a live perception in a class. Note 581 quotes the opposite slavery from A Study of Thinking (1956) by Jerome Bruner, Jacqueline Goodnow and George Austin:

[W]ere we to utilize fully our capacity for registering the differences in things and to respond to each event encountered as unique, we would soon be overwhelmed by the complexity of our environment... [It] would make us slaves to the particular... [The resolution to this paradox] is achieved by man's capacity to categorize.

Bruner's slave refuses every category and cannot act. Applied to love, settling attention under a noun ("I love you") risks Krishnamurti's slavery; treating every glance as an unrepeatable singular is Bruner's, a perceiver who cannot attend to one person across time. The archive pairs the two itself: note 581 links to note 353, Still in the Running Towards Becoming (2011), a website whose title avoids the verb to be (→ Différance), and 353 links back.

In the wiki's reading, Dissociations works between the two slaveries. It does not classify its nodes (no tags, no taxonomies), and it does not leave them as a heap of singulars: each node is defined in part by its associations. The mechanism is on About; the general frame, the via negativa from Pseudo-Dionysius to The Cloud of Unknowing, is on Apophatic Theology, of which this talk is a secular instance.

The eliminations, in the order of the talk

Jealousy, envy and comparison

The first removals are jealousy, envy, and the comparison that breeds them:

Your love is hedged about, a prisoner to jealousy, envy. […] Envy comes only when there is comparison. And is love comparison?

If what is called love depends on comparison, with other people, a former lover or an ideal, it is envy under a kinder name.

Pleasure and respectability

The harder removal is pleasure, and with it the "love of respectability" that Krishnamurti calls "the very essence of the bourgeois mind":

We were saying yesterday evening what pleasure is — the product of thought, having had pleasure of different kinds yesterday, you think about it, you have image upon image built […] and that stimulates you and that gives you pleasure, sexual or otherwise, and that you call love. And is it love? Because in pleasure there is frustration, there is pain, there is agony, there is dependency.

What image and stimulus sustain, "whether it is love, sexual love, or love of God […] or love of — God knows what else", is pleasure under a borrowed name. The substitution is hard to see because it is the common one, and because marriage, religion and status reward it as if it were the thing.

Georges Bataille gives one way to open the phrase bourgeois mind, in the summary by Jonas Čeika in his video essay Hellraiser, Bataille and Limit Experiences (2018; transcript), the essay that inspired Chemsex Benelux (→ Limit Experience):

In our daily lives we try to acquire energy and resources, try to increase our wealth. This leads us to view everything in terms of utility. This is the world of profane things. However, during a limit experience — at the height of passionate art, sex or celebration — we let ourselves go, we forget acquisition and waste resources with no expectation of return or gain. This is the sacred world, in which we escape from the servitude of utility and affirm life itself.

Read with Bataille, the love of respectability belongs to the profane order: relation organised by utility (will it last, signal, secure?) and accumulated like any other good. The unnamed survivor of Krishnamurti's eliminations is on the other side: not calculated, not acquired, not weighed against a return. He gets there by stripping away, Bataille by spending; the wiki reads both as arriving at the same place.

Profanation

Note 1266 copies, without naming its source, Leland de la Durantaye's account of Giorgio Agamben's "profane order" (boundary 2, 2008):

An integrally actual and integrally profane order in which the destructive distinctions between sacred and profane, the exception and the norm, the singular and the universal are neutralized - and put behind us. They are not to be somehow magically destroyed, not to be annihilated from the memory of man, but instead are to be seen in a new light. In such a profane order, distinctions would continue to exist; all persons and all objects would not float freely in a space without meaning, but they would cease to have the divisive force they carry today; they would cease to be instruments in the hands of those in power.

Choosing the sacred against the profane, expenditure against acquisition, installs a new hierarchy in the old shape. Krishnamurti's procedure can do the same. Someone who has subtracted jealousy, envy, comparison, pleasure, dependency and fear may arrive at a spiritual respectability that sets the one who has seen through the bourgeois mind above those who have not. The passage in 1266 points the other way. The distinctions between possessive and attentive love, between the song's mode and the talk's, persist, but they lose their divisive force: "true love" stops being a standard to fail and a line between the awakened and the sleeping.

Dependency and fear

The extract ends on dependency and the fear that comes with it:

Don't you depend psychologically on another? And when you do, when you depend on your wife or husband — whatever it is, and you say, I love you, is that love? And in that dependence is there not fear?

There the extract breaks off, before anything is named as what remains. It opens, for that matter, with positive claims of its own: "If one has love you can do what you like, then there is no conflict, then there is no evil, there is great bliss." What the full talk went on to say is not in the archive.

Discovery, trust and risk (793)

Note 793 adapts a passage from Bernard Williams's Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), where Williams discusses D. H. Lawrence's "find your deepest impulse, and follow that" against the ideal of rational self-control. The note recasts the passage in the first person ("I would suggest to find your deepest impulse") and turns Williams's "this sort of outlook" into "my sort of outlook":

The combination - discovery, trust, and risk - are central to my sort of outlook, as of course they are to the state of being in love.

By adopting the sentence, the archive takes Williams's comparison for its own: following the deepest impulse and being in love have one structure. Discovery as opposed to decision: a decision applies a criterion to known options, and love that decides ("I will love this person") has already turned into cultivation. Trust without guarantees, the guarantees being the attachments the talk subtracts. Risk as a condition: note 609, a passage that doesn't name its source, says that "where there is no risk and every commitment can be revoked without consequences, choice becomes arbitrary and meaningless".

An intimate sentence (805)

Note 805 strings together passages from N. Katherine Hayles on pattern, randomness and "flickering signifiers" ("Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers", 1993; How We Became Posthuman, 1999) without naming her. Between two of them stands one sentence in another register, of unknown source:

When I laid there beside you, could you feel me there? My arms were wrapped around you, and I was stroking your neck.

Nothing comments on it; the theoretical text closes over it and goes on. The wiki reads it as the talk's residue appearing in writing. The sentence declares nothing and demands nothing. It asks could you feel me there and does not need the answer. A line that represents nothing passes through a passage about signal and pattern without being absorbed by it.

Haddaway as negative case

What Is Love (Haddaway, 1993) is, on Krishnamurti's procedure, an almost perfect negative case. It asks the title question, and the chorus answers with a plea against injury instead of a description: "baby, don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more."

The verses spell out a transaction ("I give you my love but you don't care": love delivered, return unpaid) and run through what the talk removes: the demand that no one else take this person's place ("I want no other, no other lover"), fusion ("I know we're one, just me and you"), the demand that the other never leave ("when we are together, I need you forever"), and the conviction that life without the other cannot go on ("I can't go on"). These are forms of dependency, the last thing the talk subtracts before fear.

The song is accurate about a feeling. Most of what gets called love is this: warmth shading into need, need into the panic of loss, and the panic presenting itself as the depth of the love. Where it fails the procedure is the second step. It sees ("don't hurt me" is an exposed line for a chorus, and "gimme a sign" admits that the speaker has no inner warrant for the relation) but it does not wipe away. It loops: the wound is restated as the answer and the question is asked again.

Works that keep changing

Some works make the talk's distinction in their construction. Quantizer (2025) draws a new composition every twelve seconds from the current Ethereum block hash, so its holder owns a process with no fixed frame; Stained Unravel keeps unravelling. A collector can own the token but not a settled image, which is nearer the talk's attention than the song's demand for permanence.

Love as practice

Feelings rise and pass. Love read as the feeling is what is named when it rises and mourned when it passes. Love read as practice is sustained, closer in shape to meditation and to the way the work is made (Meditative Labour) than to any felt state.

Van den Dorpel put the opposite of that practice in one line, typed into his are.na channel God on 2 September 2022: "I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the opposite of 'love' is not 'hate', but 'neglect'." (block). Hate still attends to its object; neglect withdraws attention. In February 2025 he filed in the same channel a passage from bell hooks's All About Love that quotes Rilke: love, "just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work" (block).

The eliminations separate the capacity from its manifestations. The capacity comes first and does not depend on any object; this person, this body, this dependency are downstream. The talk clears the manifestations; the song refuses to clear anything and mistakes the capacity for the manifestation closest to hand. Note 793 names the capacity's structure as discovery, trust and risk; note 805's sentence performs it. The wiki's Propositions ends on "What cannot be authored must be initiated"; for love the same grammar gives:

What cannot be felt must be practised.

On this composite reading, love is the form of attention that survives the subtraction of the self, as the attention that does not require its object.