A Loving Hate

There’s a band I like called She Wants Revenge. Their most famous song is called ‘Tear you apart.’ The lyrics discuss the ways in which the lead singer is going to literally tear an unnamed woman apart. The refrain of the song goes something like this, “I want to hold you close, soft breath beating heart, as I whisper in your ear, I want to fucking tear you apart.”

Undoubtedly the song has violent undertones. Many people have complained about the song’s lyrics. They assert that, beyond being violent, the song is also misogynistic, in that it encourages violence towards women. I, however, have a different interpretation of the song. I think the urge to tear the woman apart that the singer expresses is not a violent urge but a sexual urge and it is an urge that the singer feels but would never literally follow through with.

I would argue that the urge to rip his lover asunder is a product of the attraction the singer feels to the woman rather than any sort of antipathy. I think most people have had feelings similar to what the singer describes. Freud defined our most basic motivators to action as eros and thanatos, love and hate. They are not bipolarities but are actually closely related in the human psyche. When we feel really passionate about someone being physically close or intimate doesn’t seem to be enough. Our passionate feelings boil over into violent ones. The urge to rip your partner apart, to tear them asunder, to claw them into shreds is a common emotion. In Punch Drunk Love Adam Sandler’s character expresses his love by saying that Freud when he stated that love and hate are closely related and are drawn from the same force. They are both primal passions. It is an almost inevitable seek more and more personal and intense ways to express our love. Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thorton both famously carried vials of each other’s blood around in order to express their love. It is a common practice among close friends to commemorate a friendship by trading blood. Some people get tattoos of their lovers names engraved on them. It is as if these people are proving their devotion through a rite of pain.

Along with a desire for pain we also have a desire to be subsumed. By subsumption I mean this as a process where we lose our own ego feelings. We lose our ideas of ourselves and our ability to rationally process thoughts. We become one with our exteriority. Freud referred to this as the feeling of the sublime which he called “oceanic” in nature. I knew a woman who told me that when she has sex she likes to literally be pressed so hard that she cannot breath. This is an expression of the desire to lose oneself in the passion of the moment.. In the famous Greek work on love, ‘The Symposium’ one character describes a myth in which, back in the misty annals of time, men and women were fused together at the hip. These joint creatures had both sets of genetalia. The act of sex, according to this myth, is our attempt to recombine into our original configuration. No matter how hard we push and shove and try to squeeze ourselves back together, the link is doomed to be incomplete and ephemeral. I always liked this image of two people futilely rubbing against each other in an attempt to create something that has been lost forever. As single human beings we have definite physical and emotional boundaries, walls which act as boundaries between us and the rest of the world. But, during sex those boundaries are partially dissolved.