...beautiful in my worn clothes...

The Transgressions of Love

by Rod Dubey  

— February 2012 — 

 

      …beautiful in my worn clothes…The Transgressions of Love is an essay on the transgressive nature of love. Love is described as a river that freely flows without regard to prohibitions based on race, gender, class or religion. It transgresses the boundaries set by church, state and family which seek to control it and is thus, inherently subversive. From the moment we begin to love those outside of our
family we are on a path which undermines its power over our lives.

Periods marked by the insistence on love have had a profound effect in shaping our world. Enhancing and respecting the loving relations between members of a community is at the heart of significant and radical views of how to remake society from voices as diverse as Shelley, Ghandi, the Surrealists, Ivan Illitch and Raoul Vaneigem. Increasingly in our daily lives we have come to define freedom as our ability to pursue the love that we autonomously feel. We see this in the struggles for gay rights, gender equality, peace, and civil rights. Love is put forth as the basis of ethics, refuting the monopoly of religions to define moral behaviour.

 

Love also transgresses the apartheid of intellectual constructs where the recommended ideals are to live a rational, objective, healthy, measured existence. Love emcompasses the subconscious, madness, the imagination and the sickness of love. It is a creative act of the whole person and the reason many of us exist at all. Love has become our central aesthetic preoccupation and the basis of free self-expression as we struggle against the idealism that censors and restricts cultural production on behalf of authority and its ideological goals.

…beautiful in my worn clothes…The Transgressions of Love is a timely book, written in a period of war and increasing simulation. It draws its examples from current events and popular culture, history, art, poetry, philosophy, fiction, music, and film.

 

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