This is not the love of fairy tales. Nor is this the love of tender compassion, which contentedly gives of itself, as though from an inexhaustible vessel of selflessness.

This love is a drug, with a roller coaster of dizzying highs and woozy lows. It is the stuff that chases butterflies in the stomach, a distant memory that haunts an addict. It is a grammatical interjection, a linguistic jolt.

This is an ever-dissolving self, where the other is a constantly changing projection of what we are and what we would like to be. It is a love which, in so many ways, turns us into the purveyors and keepers of violence. In some ways, love and its undoing can be a cavity search, an unexpected breach of a carefully guarded fortress. With the many promises associated with love as a mass cultural condition, the word is saturated with its own attending ironies and categorical imperatives. Reviling and irresistible, love is akin to a death drive that trembles on the boundaries of self-annihilation and absurdity.