is an intimate relation between lives that are imagined as 'grievable', in Judith Butler's (2002) terms, and those that are imagined as loveable and liveable in the first place. 19. Indeed, the impossibility that love can reach its object may also be what makes love powerful as a narrative. At one level, love comes into being as a form of reciprocity; the lover wants to be loved back, wants their love returned (Singer 1984: 6). At another level, love survives the absence of reciprocity in the sense that the pain of not being loved in return -- if the emotion 'stays with' the object to which it has been directed -- confirms the negation that would follow from the loss of the object. Even though love is a demand for reciprocity, it is also an emotion that lives with the failure of that demand often through an intensification of its affect (so, if you do not love me back, I may love you more as the pain of that non-loving is a sign of what it would mean not to have this love). 20. We can see how love then may work to stick others together in the absence of the loved object, even when that object is 'the nation'. Love may be especially crucial in the event of the failure of the nation to deliver its promise for the good life. So the failure of the nation to 'give back' the subject's love works to increase the investment in