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Modern philosophy is threatened by love, whose objects are never only objects Philosophers have discovered in love a lived geometry that positively demands their professional attentions; they swoop down like angels to deliver their sacred messages But love, which was not invited to the symposium before it had stolen in, remains troublesome Its power to disrupt is strategically deployed in the eternal cock-fight of philosophy   In an essay ‘The Intentionality of Love: In homage to Emmanuel Lévinas’, the Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion offers a gracious account of love’s significance for philosophy (and perhaps also philosophy’s insignificance for love) Marion describes a love that transgresses empirical knowledge, rationality and intentions; love offers the definitive answer to the philosophy of consciousness (the straw man of Western philosophy since Descartes’s dubious cogito) Falling in love, as everyone knows, is not intentional Marion’s love also refutes an existentialist philosophy that holds existence to be my own Love, as any good Franciscan will say, does not live under any logic of possession; it is never apprehended alone but in the presence of others Marion describes the faces of two lovers approaching one another: they make a quadrant of gazes, four black suns radiating and absorbing the invisible light of two gazes at their respective points, making a cross of their unbending trajectories For Marion there are two in love, no more The scene recalls a Gothic Annunciation scene where lines of sacred light describe the path of the divine message towards its target Finally, in Marion’s philosophy it is faith that makes love possible, faith acts as a guarantee in the surrender of your self to another (Faith, love might answer, or inconsolable terror) Love in this elegant diagram is an immediate knowledge for its Two In the world where a multitude of bodies and images intervene, love’s knowledge is accomplished with less geometrical certainty It is often as a problem for knowledge that love is manifest In this state of confusion, the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye offer new material to the philosophy of love   What has painting got to do