LOVE’S LESSONS

Abstract

This article provides a philosophical account of love in relation to contemporary Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of politics. Shifting the emphasis away from both the ontological question, “what is love?,” and the epistemological question, “how do we acquire certainty about love?,” this article advances a pedagogical question: how might love enable us to learn? To answer this question we turn to the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. After examining the tensions between ontological and ideological conceptions of love, we explore Hardt and Negri’s work on love as part of the affective labour of the “multitude.” We then trace the development of Deleuze’s early work on love as an apprenticeship to signs to his later exploration (with Guattari) of love in relation to multiplicity. In doing so, this article seeks to renovate the concept of love itself, framing it in terms of difference rather than merging and unity, and locating it outside the confines of the heterosexual couple and nuclear family.

Keywords:

• love
• political community
• Deleuze
• Hardt and Negri
• multitude

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For a historical discussion of this literature, see De Lauretis. See also Kipnis; Edelman.

2 See also Edelman.

3 See also Warner, Trouble.

4 See also Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s influential work on political coalitions, e.g., Laclau and Mouffe and the essays on populism and liberal democracy collected in Panizza.

5 See also Negri, Time 192–93.

6 We distinguish this criticism of “love of the same” from the Freudian legacy, which casts the homosexual as narcissist for loving “the same” or the young girl as weakened from not having differentiated herself from “the same” (i.e., the mother). This theme within Freud’s writings has been criticised exhaustively within feminist and queer scholarship. See Warner, “Homo-Narcissism.”

7 See also Young.

8 See also Hardt, “For Love” 677.

9 See also De Beauvoir 654–63.

10 One of Deleuze and Guattari’s signature lists points to the connective aspect of the intensive multiplicity:

A pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus’s voice [cf. In Search of Lost Time], a horde of wolves in somebody’s throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other. (Thousand 40)