Cultural signs and ideological masks

Abstract

  Love is a field for changing titles and abandoning constants in favor of imagined ones. Due to its shared cultural and psychological aspects, it alone makes a person symbolically abandon their apparent being and belong to an imagined being. Whether it is a beloved or an idea, it is no wonder that we find Arab and Islamic love stories always end in love and madness and are suffocated by chastity. Although these narratives often seem artificial, culture has established a standard for love among Arabs that relates to credibility and immortality, linking it to chastity. However, chastity, as an intentional principle, contradicts the excessiveness that characterizes passion and the sensory image carried by the signifier of passion, the image of the agitated she-camel seeking the male. This represents a tension and contradiction that can only be resolved by death, which achieves stillness and tranquility. Passion, from the outset, is founded on this contradiction between the driving force of longing, natural in what is called natural love, and the artificial boundaries that make passion transcend institutions. At the same time, it creates a symbolic imaginary being that can hardly bear existence. The ancients did not realize the strangeness of this creature they invented: longing without the will to unite, longing without movement, passion without longing, passion for prohibition, the pleasure of prohibition, passion for the prohibitive authority itself, passion without passion. This creature can only exist in poetry, because poetry is essentially a game of imagination, capable of creating the impossible through language. Through the investment of interpretation, the interpreter can manipulate any truth. Therefore, the distinctive idea of love among Arabs can be seen as a purifying act, while for other peoples, it is a matter of the body. The West even refers to love as 'making love,' a euphemism for the physical act that encapsulates the idea of love.