ABSTRACT
The transition from the sexual drive to love is precisely the transition from viewing humans as inevitable candidates for irony, to viewing them as capable of becoming ironic with respect to themselves. Sigmund Freud was not explicitly aware that this is what he was doing when he introduced love as a basic drive. We take our sexuality to reveal our animal nature, yet Freud’s distinctive contribution is to show us how in our sexuality we are so unlike other animals. It is as though Freud plays the role of reluctant straight man: he keeps seeing that nature is playing a joke on us—indeed, that we are nature’s joke—but he passes the joke along without fully getting it. Freud wants to conceptualize the concept of a drive along the lines of a biological instinct, but it is precisely because the task can never be completed that its solution seems just around the corner.
