Saying I-love-you is an evil thing to do

I-love-you has no usages. Like a child’s word, it enters into no social constraint. It can be a sublime, solemn, trivial word. It can be an erotic, pornographic word. It is a socially irresponsible word.

I-love-you is without nuance. It suppresses explanations, adjustments, degrees, scruples. In a exorbitant paradox of language, to say I-love-you is to proceed as if there were no theater of speech, and this word is always true. It has no other referent than its utterance: it is only a performance.

I-love-you has no “elsewhere”. It is the word of the dyad, both maternal and amorous. In it, no distance, no distortion will split the sign. It is the metaphor of nothing else.

I-love-you is not a sentence. It does not transmit a meaning, but fastens onto a limited situation: “the one where the subject is suspended in a mirrorlike relation to the other.” It is a hollow phrase.

I-love-you, though spoken billions of times, is outside our daily vocabulary. It is a figure whose definition cannot transcend the heading.

—A passage from Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, which reminds me of the menage a trois in THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (Philip Kaufman, 1988)