jockbot vs. dorkbot

The boys went over to Aggers house for a piss up and everyone who turned up had to give a speech in praise of love. When Stoppa’s turn came to speak he said he wasn’t sure if his talk was going to be absurd or funny, but in any case he went on to to tell this story about Eros:

Back in the day humans were double bodied, with faces and limbs turned away from each other, like siamese twins fused back-to-back. These odd creatures were almost spherical in shape and looked like clowns doing cartwheels. They came in three sexes: male, female and androgynous, who were half of each. Apparently they were extremely arrogant creatures, powerful and resourceful but also grotesque and filthy, rolling about the place eating and masturbating and basically being in love with themselves. In their vanity and self-adoration these spherical blobs decided to scale the heavens and challenge the gods. Prior to this Zeus merely found them irritating, but after such a show of petulance he seriously considered blasting them to death with thunderbolts. Zeus wasn’t exactly selfless it must be said, and wanting to keep the devotions and offerings of the arrogant humans he settled for chopping them in half, making two bodies of each. After the butchery Zeus left the cosmetic surgery up to Appollo who turned the faces of each and stretched the skin tightly, stitching the new body up at the belly button, a scar left as reminder. But if arrogance was characteristic of the quadruped then forgetting was characteristic of the new biped. Since then, humans have run around blindly and obsessively looking for love, forever searching to find their other half whom they have forgotten. And when the humans do fall in love – although they can never know if their love is their lost half – they proclaim to feel ‘whole’.

I think Stoppa is right to ask if his speech is absurd. The concept of love as loss, as a forgetting, and as lacking, specifically as being a bifurcation, is not all that appealing. Would one really want to limit a concept of love to an amnesic coupling? To speak about the origin of humanity as contemporaneous with the creation of love, that is to say, at their origin humans are constituted by love, is actually very appealing, but I was wanting to think love more as a fusion and a binding, a membering rather than a remembering, and certainly not a brutal cleave in two. Of course, love simultaneously remembers and forgets, contains both fusion and fission, its event is a complex. So maybe Stoppa’s absurd tale has its logic, and knowing his comic reputation he’s no doubt enjoying a laugh. In any case, it sounds like our bulbous ancestors well deserved the chop.

A different tale of the origin of humanity was told in the house of Bernard Stiegler, the philosopher who discovered his calling for philosophy whilst serving jail time for armed robbery. On the occasion of his 48th birthday he was visited by two Melbourne-based filmmakers who were in the middle of a trip up the river Danube whilst making their beautiful film The Ister. As the guests arrive for his birthday party Stiegler tells us