Romantic love in the west received energies from neoplatonism, just as the islamic world; and romance provided an acceptable (still orthodox)means of compromise between Christian morality and the rediscovered erotocosm of Antiquity. Even so the balncing-act was precarious: -- Pico della Mirandola and the pagan Botticelli ended up in the arms of Savonarola. A secretive minority of Renaissance nobles, churchmen and artists opted out altogether in favor of clandestin paganism; the Hypnerotomachia of Poliphilo, or the garden Monsters at Bomarzo, bear witness to the existence of this "tantrik" sect. But for most platonizers, the idea of alove based on longing alone served orthodox and allegorical ends, in which the material beloved can only be a distant shadow of the real (as exemplified by such as St. Theresa and St.John of the Cross) and can only be loved according to a "chivalrous", chaste and penetential code. The whole ppoint of Malory´s Morte dArthur is that Lancelot fails to achieve the chevalric ideal by loving Guenivere in the flesh rather than omly in the spirit.

The emergence of Capitalism exercizes a strange effect on romance. I acn only express it with an absurd fantasy: -- it´s as if the Beloved becomes the perfect commodity, always desired, always paid for, but never really enjoyed. The self-denial of Romance harmonizes neatly with the self-denial of Capitalism. Capital demands scarcity, both of production and of erotic pleasure, rather than limit its requirements simply to morality or chastity. Religion forbids sexuality, thus investing denial with glamor; capital withdraws sexuality, infusing it with despair. "Romance" now leads to the Wertherian suicide, Byron´s disgust, the chastity of the dandies. In this sense, romance will become the perfect two-dimensional obsession of the popular song and the advertizement, serving the utopian trace within the infinite reproduction of the commodity.

In response to this situation, modern times have offered two judgements of romance, apperently opposed, which relateto our present hermeneutic. One, the surrealist amour fou, clearly belongs to the romantic tradition, but proposes a radical solution to the paradox of desire by combining the idea of sublimation with the tantrik perspective.In opposing the scarcity (or "emotional plague"as Reich called it) of Capitalism, Surrealism proposes a transgressive excess of the most obssessive desire and the most sensual realization. What the romance of Nezami or Malory had separated ("longing" and "union"), the Surrealists proposed to recombine. The effect was meant to be explosive, literally revolutionary.

The second point of view relevant here was also revolutionary, but "classical" rather than "romantic". The anarchist-individualist John Henry Mackay despaired of romantic love, which he could only see as tainted with the social forms of ownership and alienation. The romantic lover longs to "possess" or to be possessed by the beloved. If marriage is simply legal prostitution (the usual anarchist analysis), Mackay found that "love" itself had become a commodity-form. Romantic love is a sickness of the ego and its relation to "property"; in opposition Mackay proposed erotic friendship, free of property relations, based on generosity rather than longing and withdrawal (i.e.,scarcity): - a love between equal self-rulers.

good job this guy. mackay is officially stirner-reader by the way.