Chris Bell, founding member of the band Big Star produced only one solo album; 1971’s i am the cosmos. The epononymous track is a tremendous demonstration of core features of the effect of love, and how ambivelence and contradiction can be generated not through dynamic shifts or tonal breaks, but through one unified theory. I am the cosmos argues along the lines of Slavoj Zizek, who argues that love is a violent disaster that not only destabilises the symbolic frame of the subject, but destabilises the imaginary properties of the subject itself, rendering bare the split at the core of subjectivity. Resistent to an instantaneous maxim, Bell’s encounter with love is at once narcissistic, displacing and transformative.

Take care to notice the album cover already is rich in signification; the bold Arial Fontwork of CHRIS BELL against the entirely lowercase i am the cosmos, foreshadows capriciousness whilst demonstrating the tragedy at the heart of Freudian narcissism; that it is through self-aggrandisement, not through repression, that the subject encounters it’s own limit in the field via powerful cathetic love-object choices. The object of affection is at once extraordinarily personal and yet alien and unencounterable. Though the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan makes several coherent demonstrations that love can be discretely imaginary, symbolic or real, the fracture that love presents is an interweaving of the three. The encounter with love is imaginary; we fantasize about our object of affection, dream of unity and the non-lack, yet it is also symbolic; our fantasies render us in a particular relationship to the gaze of the Other, and love mocks these relationships – our “type”, our “preferences”, our “red-flags” suddenly become negotiable, even our most private wishes and dreams may suddenly be recast in our assumption of the returned love of the chosen object. But let’s make an important qualifier here: as Leon Brenner says [1], there is no promise of the return of our love from the Other, only a reciperocation in a mathmatical sense; our numerator (dream, wishes, plans, preferences) are subject to a violent reciperocal of our displacing love. In this sense, as he says, when the subject loves, they are enamoured. Love returns akin to the return of the symbolic in psychosis from the outside-in, accounting for Clérembault’s syndrome, otherwise known as Erotomania.

Erotomania is the deepest expression of love returning from the “other-side” and is perfectly encountered by Bell’s ex-bandmate, Alex Chilton, in his song Dream Lover:

“You’re a dream lover, and I’m never gonna let you go… … the real, so real Scene twixt me and you And I wake up and shiver A lonely quiver And I don’t know where to look”

Chilton initially explores Erotomania in the context of the dream, but stages it as a classic encounter with fantasy that neatly reflects Zizek’s assessment of fantasy as the means by which we encounter reality through staging it both as a theatrical space (“scene twixt me and you”) whilst insisting in its reality: pay attention to Chilton’s infliction where “real, so real” misses by a hairs length the metonymic echo of “real, surreal” – a substitution with not only a warehouse of similar conclusions in popular music but equally an accurate debt to the etmology of surreal as “above reality” – akin to Freud’s Uber-Ich, the fantasy locates itself superimposed above reality topologically, which in the theatre of the subjects, in whose hunt for unity provides the basis for erotomania itself, which can be defined as the moment in which the two registers structurally merge.

Erotomania is roughly speaking, extremely rare, but what stops this merging in the subject, when they encounter love from the “Other side”? Lacan’s quest to invite German Idealism into psychoanalysis provides an askance answer; Hegel’s nothing as productive, or in Lacanese, lack as engine of Desire, which he roughly compares to the second law of thermodynamics, or “die Entropie der Welt strebt einem Maximum zu” [2]. Desire seeks to “fill in the gaps” of our experience, in efforts to return to the foremost Lacanian myth of the subject, Das Ding; an illusory realm of pure presence, in which nothing is lacking, and we are enraptured in pure edenic bliss. Correctly, many commentators compare this experience to that of death, and that in the Freudian sense life, or human reality, is a kind of aberrant surplus, or as Zizek echoes;

“…the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void, then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed… the fact that it’s not just nothing, things are out there, it means something went terribly wrong” [3].

This conception of reality, in which abberant matter disturbs the void, permits Hegel’s notion of the dielectic between being and nothing, a space that permits a kind of topological sandwich between superimposed concepts of the subject. When love returns to us from the Other side, reality is encounter through fantasy, and the difference of one from the other enables the subject to oscillate through both, without resolution in either. A type of superposition in which the subject may experience love as both a fantasy of unity and a violent break with reality.

Bell expresses this clearly in the lyrical and emotional climax of the song in which the split subject is made bare;

“I never want to see you again, I really want to see you again”

Some commentators have argued that these lyrics are demonstrative of Bell’s struggle with repressed homosexuality, but there is a truth that transcends object-choice; when we love, we love as an act from a place of total embodied subjectivity and alien encounter – we act in spite of ourselves, or in fidelity to a domain that is at once innate and ectopic.

[1] Brenner, L. (2025, April 9). Feelings are always reciprocal. Leon Brenner. https://leonbrenner.com/2025/04/09/feelings-are-always-reciprocal/

[2] Clausius, R. (1867). Abhandlungen über die mechanische Wärmetheorie. Germany: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn.

[3] Slavoj Žižek: Love is evil. (n.d.). Www.youtube.com. Retrieved Aug 20, 2025, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg7qdowoemo