ABSTRACT
The theme of love is omnipresent in the oeuvre of Gherasim Luca. Breaking out of routines-here perceptual and conceptual, elsewhere social or religious — and re-establishing within oneself a kind of innocence or purity ready to receive the Other fully has often been put forward by writers as the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for attaining genuine love. However, the miraculous arrival of a beloved woman has also often been stated, even staged, in countless pieces by other poets, albeit usually without the preparations requiring, as here, such a violent renunciation of one's parents and the Creator. Luca's originality, in regard to a theory of love, becomes more obvious, in The Inventor of Love, just after the rather meticulous exposition of prerequisites enabling an authentic love to take place. Luca emphasizes the psychoanalytical and, especially, ontological consequences of this vision of a woman as a "rendezvous".
