The writer & the absent lover
António Manso Preto, Mehmet Süzgün

To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love. – Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Queer love, in a sense, is always long-distance. Its vitality depends on a continual dialecticbetween the absence and presence of the beloved—a dynamic later imposed on the enamouredwriter, whose writing becomes a persistent task, a labor of attention and longing. The loverbecomes a figure of constant departure, whose presence is apprehended by the writer eitherthrough bodily intimacy or the sheer imaging of that bodily company. It is precisely in this gapthat desire is produced: the lover’s refusal to appear, embodied or sublimated through epistolary,conversational and/as solitary writing.

We’re interested in how canonical mysticism can inform desire and writing. Through excerptsfrom literature and theory we aim to create a conversation and examine the “presence ofabsence” through the example of the enamoured writer. A reading of the tradition of love assomething pure, perhaps holy – in the sense of an unresolved fantasy of constant presence thatone must desire – may perhaps help us understand the radical possibilities (or possiblereconfigurations) of queer love and relationality and what that entails.

António Manso Preto (b. 2001) is a writer and artist based in Amsterdam. His recent practice investigates the possibility of a homosexual semiotics, cruising as a symbolic practice, or the lover as a character of earthly mysticism.

Mehmet Süzgün (b. 1998) is an independent writer and art critic based in Amsterdam, who cannot seem to stop himself from working towards and against homosexual aesthetics. He has contributed to Flash Art and Tangents magazines.