Falling in love as catastrophe
example ·
retold in 5 talks
Žižek illustrates authentic love using the English/French phrase 'falling in love': you live a stupidly happy life, then fall in love passionately, this is in some sense a catastrophe, all balance lost. Authentic love is traumatic, not a source of happiness.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 4
“let's say you live a stupidly happy life. maybe one night stand here and there, you drink with friends, then you fall in love passionately. this is in some sense a catastrophe for your life. all the balance is lost.”
“All of a sudden you fall passionately in love. Can you imagine a worse catastrophe? All the balance of your life is disturbed.”
“love is a catastrophe. Imagine your nice life... Then you fall passionately in love. Your daily rhythm is disturbed.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Lukas Dhont1Christopher Wylie1Martin Seligman1Jacobins1Jeremiah Glick1Daniel Bell1François Laruelle1Margaret Atwood2
alongside works
Every retelling 4
Žižek illustrates authentic love using the English/French phrase 'falling in love': you live a stupidly happy life, then fall in love passionately, this is in some sense a catastrophe, all balance lost. Authentic love is traumatic, not a source of happiness., illustrating happiness as byproduct,love as trauma,trans-functionalization
You live a pleasant life, drinking with friends, one-night stands, stable work, then fall passionately in love: jealousy, loss of concentration, total disruption. Žižek uses the phenomenology of falling in love to illustrate that desire necessarily disturbs happiness., illustrating desire (Lacanian ethics),death drive,authentic free choice as experienced necessity
Žižek quotes Neil Gaiman that 'love is a catastrophe' because it disturbs happy daily rhythms, yet argues this disruption is necessary for a meaningful life., illustrating love is a catastrophe,subjectivity
You live your ordinary life; then you suddenly realize you are already in love, you never chose it in the present, illustrating Schelling's unconscious free decisions that retroactively constitute the subject., illustrating self-positing,retroactive causality,truthful fiction