Is Love a Scripture?

Pol Guasch, a doctoral researcher at the ADHUC research centre, will defend the doctoral thesis Is Love a Scripture? An Interpretation of Love as a Writing Technology in the Works of Marina Tsvetayeva, Franz Kafka and Clarice Lispector, supervised by Joana Masó.

This doctoral thesis examines love as a writing technology. It engages with dominant approaches in contemporary studies of love—particularly the sociological perspective associated with Eva Illouz—and proposes three illustrative avenues through which this interpretation may be developed, drawing on the works of three twentieth-century authors: Marina Tsvetaeva, Franz Kafka, and Clarice Lispector. The study begins with a comparative section that reviews contemporary disciplinary approaches to love, while also elaborating the concept of “writing technology” by tracing its genealogy from Martin Heidegger to Walter J. Ong. It then turns to an analysis of three canonical poetics that have not traditionally been historicised as poetics of love, thereby revealing a broader neglect of literature as a discipline capable of reflecting on love. In this context, the thesis demonstrates how the concept of “writing technology” illuminates overlooked dimensions of the experience of love as it unfolds in parallel with writing. This initial framework serves to account for the contemporary marginalisation of literature’s role in articulating love, despite the longstanding historical relationship between the two. The coining of the term “writing technology” seeks to recover this neglected dimension by foregrounding the artificial and scriptural aspects of love, while emphasising its significance in the subjective and social construction of the individual as a technology of the self articulated through writing. At the same time, the term functions as an interpretative framework through which to approach the work of Marina Tsvetaeva—described by Joseph Brodsky as a “technology”—the love letters of Franz Kafka—characterised by Elias Canetti as a “literary work”—and selected short stories by Clarice Lispector, identified by Hélène Cixous as emblematic of écriture féminine, a concept that shares several features with that of “writing technology”. These three authors exhibit a complex relationship with language, origin, and the written expression of love, each emphasising the artificial dimension of both writing and the experience of love. This emphasis extends beyond their positioning, within their respective literary systems, as instances of what Deleuze and Guattari term “minor literature”. Taken together, this triangulated reading underscores the need to expand the conceptual frameworks through which contemporary love is examined. It advocates a renewed engagement with the literary text through a concept that foregrounds its artificial and prosthetic dimensions, as well as its role in the subjective, social, and collective construction of experience.