Abstracts for Nuori Voima 4/2005

AINA BERGROTH
Rakkaus tappaa. Sarah Kane ja kohtuuttomuus [Love kills. The unreasonable Sarah Kane]

In her article, Aina Bergroth discusses the plays of Sarah Kane, and emphasizes their dark vision of human relations. For Kane, love involves power, manipulation, and submission. Bergroth places Kane in the tradition of the theatre of cruelty and of the absurd, represented, for example, by Artaud, Genet, Beckett, and Pinter, although Phaedra’s Love makes direct reference also to Greek tragedy. In Kane’s plays, love is something characters most desire, but at the same time it is made impossible by their destructive urges; in the end, love kills.

VILLE SUTINEN
“Rakkaus on mielenhäiriö” ? Rakastuneen hullun lyyrinen diskurssi 2000-luvun esikoiskokoelmissa [“Love is insanity”? The lyrical discourse of the mad lover in young Finnish poetry since the year 2000]

In his article, Ville Sutinen uses Rolard Barthes’ work Lover’s Discourse as a starting point when discussing the work of some young Finnish poets who have started since the year 2000. Following Barthes, Sutinen finds the descriptions of being in love to be constructed from a limited number of figures and tropes. Paradoxically, even the experience of being “madly in love”, where the lover supposedly loses themself, proves to be rhetorical in nature: the love is always something written, and sometimes even self-consciously so.

ALAIN BADIOU
Mitä rakkaus on? [What is love?]

The French philosopher Alain Badiou illuminates the phenomenon of love in the context of his mathematical ontology. For Badiou, truth takes place according to four different procedures: science, art, politics – and love. For Badiou, humanity is merely something (“function H(x)”) that supports the truth-procedures. Humanity function is divided into two positions, feminine and masculine. By forming a “disjuntion” between them, love unites these positions into an irreducible Two.

JUHA T. KOSKINEN
Petollinen ääni ? rakkausduetot 1600-luvun venetsialaisoopperassa. [The deceitful voice? Love duets in seventeenth-century Venetian opera]

Seventeenth-century Venetian opera invented love duets. According to Finnish composer Juha T. Koskinen, the representation of love in these duets was complicated by the fact that the male part was sung by a castrate. There were then two feminine voices singing, which can be interpreted as referring to love’s origins in narcissism. The sexual roles were blurred also by the conventions such as travestimento, changing of one’s (sexual) identity with a disguise.