ABSTRACT
While rejecting essentialism about human nature, many remain essentialists about human relationships: essentialist definitions of love abound. Such definitions might be legitimized by establishing a biological origin to the distinct funct ions of different forms of love. But most contemporary writers on love would find a purely biological explanation quite unsatisfactory. Could an essentialist definition -- a notion of "true love" -- be grounded in a view of Human Nature that did not have roots in biology, but in some other, perhaps social, feature of the human condition? The answer proposed in this paper is that love is routinely corrupted by being "digitalized", that is, defined as falling into distinct forms in a limited number of exclu sive categories, to the extent that it plays a role in the individuation of repeatable social roles. A "reformist" view of love will aim to increase the number of categories available. ("Let's allow gay marriages", for example.) A radical response, exempl ified by a certain kind of "queer theory", aims at the rejection of the very notion that every relationship and every emotions can be classified according to some fixed schema of any sort (Let's eliminate even the concept of `homosexual' or `heterosexual' , `man' and `woman'). The contrast seems to be between a conception of love that is oriented to the individual, and one that is oriented to the need for knowledge, or information, and the transmission and social use of that information. If love serves ROL ES, then it needs to come "digitalized". If it serves the self-definition of INDIVIDUALS, however, then it need not; in that case, indeed, it is better to think of love on the model of the aesthetic, in which (in the modern as opposed to the Platonic opti c) the work of art is intended to be just itself and not (a copy of or representation of) any other thing. To "undigitize love", then, is to make an ideologically charged move that purports to downplay its role in social semantics, and restore it to an em otional esthetics grounded in the unique interactions of individuals.