What’s love got to do with it?
Alain Badiou (2012) says that love without risk is an impossibility. In our times, love has two enemies. Safety says do not go there as it will be troublesome. Denial says love’s challenge, and its experience of difference, is not important. Together, love’s twin enemies say: ‘stay in your comfort zone!’
In Badiou’s view, conventional politics and love do not mix very well. Politics has an obsessive focus on enemies, parties, and the self. Badiou believes, therefore, that love should be separated from politics. But there is a connection between love and politics because love changes one from within - in the here and now - but only if a person is willing to escape their comfort zone. And that, in my reading of Badiou, is love’s link back to politics. Dead politics like dead love regulates you to be safe and comfortable and caught up in the self (or party or leader) as well as notions of hate (or division). People in love though take a risk to put their trust in difference and the other (sometimes even before themselves and notwithstanding the external environment - think Romeo and Juliet but forget for a moment the ending (!)).
In conventional politics, both incumbents and reactionaries can be suspicious of love because of its ability to radically change our being. Reactionaries are suspicious of love in the name of me and ‘my identity’ in the campaign to dislodge the incumbents. Incumbents, particularly autocratic incumbents, are suspicious of love because it denotes truth and, therefore, is an inherent threat to ‘their’ power.
“At the most minimal level, people in love put their trust in difference rather than being suspicious of it. Reactionaries are always suspicious of difference in the name of identity … if we, on the contrary, want to open ourselves up to difference and its implications, so the collective can become the whole world, then the defence of love becomes one point individuals have to practice. The identity cult of repetition must be challenged by love of what is different, is unique, is unrepeatable, unstable and foreign.“
If we open up to difference then, Badiou says, it opens the possibility that ‘the collective can become the whole world’. By that Badiou does not mean we lose our identities: rather, as when two lovers come together, they become one but retain their own uniqueness and distinctiveness; there may be something in that idea for the political community. For Badiou this is not Platonic love that is universal or transcendental (where we love all strangers alike). Rather, for him, this is love as truth-telling and problem solving which requires long-term cultivation:
“Love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is above all a construction that lasts.We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.“
For Badiou, like Socrates, love is an essential pre-condition to philosophy and by extension politics, poetry, science and art. Love’s ‘violent onslaught’, uncertainty and even ordinariness - queens, kings and serfs alike fall in love (!) - is necessary to root philosophy, and philosophers, in the real world. Badiou and Socrates both say start with love and its seduction: without it there is no philosophy. Once one is on the journey then it is the declaration of love, for Badiou, that the chance encounter becomes a fulfilment of destiny. This declaration and its ongoing reiterations, therefore, are transformative: for the individual, for sure, and arguably for the political community too. Truth-telling in politics is love made visible.
This is the first of ten very short takes on books that helped shape the forthcoming: ‘A Constitution of the People’.
Sources: Alan Badiou, In Praise of Love (2012); The Meaning of Sarkozy (2010). Other things that might interest is the wonderful chapter on Love in Gibran’s, The Prophet and Cornel West’s numerous takes on justice and love.