of the (therapeutic, therefore intimate) relationship developing between the analyst and the analysand, each of whom reveals themselves, from the beginning (of the book, which may not be the beginning of the story) to possess the emotional receptors required for the necessary bond to quickly, deeply form. Still, it is not until page thirty-nine that the interruption admits, in so many words:

“If I can’t kick this

door open, there isn’t hope—”

TWO LETTERS

The letter—an email, technically—from the capitalist began, unsurprisingly, “Dear Colleagues” and ended “Yours, &c,” a flourish that, despite myself, I found charming. (What is charming about the old-fashioned, ever? Especially when found in a smiling, towering capitalist with eyes that sparkle like fairy dust? This, too, is among the questions being asked, though differently aspected, by both Love and Anti-Love.)

In the middle of the letter a sentence stood out, by which I mean a sentence appeared to have been tucked away for those who might bother to find it. It was a long sentence, uncharacteristic of the capitalist as I knew him, but it was positioned between short ones containing just the pieces of information that would call out to any readers who were skimming the email for such—the “Co-Lab” session will take place at which media conglomerate’s headquarters, at what hour, and whether this time we would be required to provide one or two pieces of photo ID to be let through the blinking lights of the secured turnstiles—and he’d even bothered to tag onto the end of the sentence itself a morsel of informative content that was also meant to be skimmed:

“I have been pondering the use-value of this program to the extent of wondering if our efforts, as cofacilitators, to provide divergent points of view on the subject may be backfiring, a case of too many competing flavors creating a tasteless or an untasteable stew, and I wonder if we should have a conversation about this, which come to think of it reminds me that we had requests for more vegan options at the Co-Lab lunch, so I’ve arranged for a greater number of the pizzas to be cheese free.”

I don’t want to credit the capitalist with intending to introduce a question that—only when unmoored from its context and applied to others—feels so close to one I have returned to frequently without ever managing to articulate it: What is the difference between the tasteless and the untasteable?

It will seem strange to claim this question, of all others, as a summary of our conversations in Anti-Love. But if you think about it, if you draw it as a diagram, doesn’t the difference have everything to do with learned desire?

And then, from S:

“Dear E, I wanted to send you something through time and space, and through a network of anarchically organized bodies with history. Futurity? Maybe also. But it will be short, this. Telegraphic, even.