When we try to explain our feelings about love, the more we try to describe them, the more the feelings of love run away from what we feel. Can we articulate the feelings of love in language? The Giver shows us to sense love and its feelings which are living in the relation with others. Hegel wrote two articles about love in his early writings. According to Hegel, love is a feeling not understanding or reason. Love is not connected to ‘a’ feeling but various feelings. As we know, love does not have only joyous or happy feelings. Love is very complicated with a multitude of feelings. Distinguishing love which is animating from one which is deadening, Hegel connects love with feelings of indignation, anger, hostility, and shame. He seeks love which is living in others. Moreover, Judith Butler thinks love can be animating in grief or loss. She insists mourning the loss is the precondition of love. She believes the animating powers of love which testify to a persistent aliveness in the loss. In The Giver, there is no love in the community where a protagonist, Jonas, lives. They try to define their feelings into some words but the feelings are deadened as soon as they are fixed in language. The community seeks the same, equality, and safety but people in the community are dispossessed of their living feelings, imagination, and even love. Just there are lifeless laws, prohibitions, and obedience without any conflict in the community. Through Hegel’s perspective, the community and people in community are also deadened. Through Butler’s view, sensing what is living in love with others is to give up a fantasy that the sameness, equality and safety without any lack are the best policy for the community which struggles to prevent from difference, conflict, and disorder.
