Alain Badiou

Nicolas Truong

A new century, new threats to love . . . Love without risks is like war without deaths - but, today, love is threatened by an alliance of liberalism and hedonism. Caught between consumerism and casual sexual encounters devoid of passion, love - without the key ingredient of chance - is in danger of withering on the vine.In In Praise of Love, Alain Badiou takes on contemporary 'dating agency' conceptions of love that come complete with zero-risk insurance - like US zero-casualty bombs. He develops a new take on love that sees it as an adventure, and an opportunity for re-invention, in a constant exploration of otherness and difference that leads the individual out of an obsession with identity and self. Liberal, libertine and libertarian reductions of love to instant pleasure and non-commitment bite the dust as Badiou invokes a supporting cast of thinkers from Plato to Lacan via Karl Marx to form a new narrative of romance, relationships and sex - a narrative that does not fear love.

In Praise of Love

Gavin

A leftist defence of marriage and a postmodern attempt at making love a big deal, ontologically speaking; beyond this initial frisson of meta-contrarian goodness, though: meh. Book's a bite-sized transcription of a formal literary talk - a genre which may well have no good instance. Here's the solitary pair of beautiful moments in an otherwise lukewarm bath of the history of philosophy of love and lazy sub-systematic Lacanian guesswork*:

While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist[ic] manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock, love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life that is consequently disrupted and re-fashioned.

Love is an existential project: to construct a decentred world, from a point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive and re-affirm my own identity... When I lean on the shoulder of the woman I love, and can see, let’s say, the peace of a twilight over a mountain landscape, gold-green fields, the shadows of trees, black-nosed sheep motionless behind hedges and sun about to disappear behind craggy peaks, and know — not from the expression on her face, but from within the world as it is — that she is seeing the same world, and that this convergence is part of the world; that love constitutes precisely, at that very moment, the paradox of an identical difference, then love exists, and promises to continue existing. The fact is she and I are now incorporated into this unique subject, the subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference, so this world can be conceived, be born, and not simply represent what fills my own individual gaze. Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world.

Clearer prose than you'd expect, though, isn't it?

* e.g. laziness: his claim about there being four "conditions" of philosophy, none of which are in fact necessary conditions, and one of which is good old dyadic love:
 Anyone who doesn't take love as their starting-point will never discover what philosophy is about.
(Never mind, Cavendish; oh well Newton, sorry Schopenhauer; you tried real hard.)

In Praise of Love

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