Love in the sense Žižek understands it was first developed by Lacan in his Seminar XX. It is thus from the beginning associated with a certain 'feminine' logic of the not-all and implies a way of thinking beyond the master-signifier and its universality guaranteed by exception: 'Lacan's extensive discussion of love in Seminar XX is thus to be read in the Paulinian sense, as opposed to the dialectic of the Law and its transgression. This latter dialectic is clearly "masculine" or phallic ... Love, on the other hand, is "feminine": it involves the paradoxes of the not-All' (p. 309). Žižek associates love with St Paul, and it is a way for him to think the difference between Judaism, whose libidinal economy is still fundamentally that of the law and its transgression, and Christianity, which through forgiveness and the possibility of being born again seeks to overcome this dialectic: 'It is here that one should insist on how Lacan accomplishes the passage from Law to Love, in short, from Judaism to Christianity' (p. 318). In other words, this love might be seen to testify--as we also find with drive and enunciation--to a moment that precedes and makes possible the symbolic order and its social mediation, the way in which things are never directly what they are but only stand in for something else: 'Love bears witness to the abyss of a self-relating gesture by means of which, due to the lack of an independent guarantee of the social pact, the ruler himself has to guarantee the Truth of his word' (p. 245 n. 5).
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