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ABSTRACT
The paper sketches out an account of ambiguous and agonistic love by drawing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Axel Honneth and Hannah Arendt. To begin with, I reconstruct the ambiguity of love within the conceptual framework of a paradigm of recognition. I argue further that the social relation of love, understood as an intertwine between dependence and independence, entails a power dynamic. Insofar as the dynamic actualises as “power in concert” or “power with”, namely as mutual empowerment, love unfolds as free love. Finally, I show how agonistic love is damaged by turning into violent domination.
Acknowledgements
I would like to warmly thank Penelope Deutscher, Estelle Ferrarese, Matthias Flatscher, Odin Lysaker and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and criticims that have very much helped me to improve the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Federica Gregoratto is Lecturer in the philosophy department of the University of St. Gall. Before joining the department in September 2015, she earned a PhD in philosophy from Ca’ Foscari University, Venice (2012) and was postdoctoral research fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” at Goethe University, Frankfurt a.M. (2013–2015). Her areas of specialisation and interests include: critical theory (especially Adorno and Habermas), American pragmatism (especially Dewey), recognition theories, philosophy of love, power theories, gender and intersectionalist studies.
Notes
1. In this article, I concentrate only on this type of love, leaving aside other types, as for instance parental love or agape.
2. See e.g. Nozick, “Love’s Bond”; Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love; Helm, Love, Friendship, and the Self; Milligan, Love; Honneth, Freedom’s Right; Pettit, The Robust Demands of the Good.
3. See e.g. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex; Federici, Revolution at Point Zero; Illouz, Why Love Hurts? A Sociological Explanation; Jónasdóttir and Ferguson, Love.
4. There are of course exception, see e.g. Friedman, “Romantic Love and Personal Autonomy”.
5. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 724–5.
6. Ibid., 723.
7. Ibid., 781.
8. Ibid., 779.
9. Ibid., 17.
10. Ibid., 167; 187–8.
11. Ibid., 209.
12. Ibid., 427.
13. Ibid., 426.
14. Ibid., 781—2. See also Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 96.
15. It must be acknowledged that Beauvoir sometimes frames loving mutual recognition as “harmony” (Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 427; 779). According to Penelope Deutscher, Beauvoir conceives of “the ‘highest’ human achievement” as “associated with the generosity of some variation on reciprocal recognition”; the emancipatory potential of the idea of reciprocal recognition would then help her to formulate alternatives to a notion of love and sexuality critically grasped as “appropriation, narcissism, subjection, and objectification”. It is unclear, Deutscher argues, whether Beauvoir thinks that the ethical ideal of reciprocal recognition can ever be definitely accomplished. Deutscher’s own suggestion is to retain an “appreciation of her interest in reciprocity, concurrent with an appreciation of the complexity she attributed to it”. The affirmation of the complexity, or ambiguity of reciprocal recognition would consist, according to Deutscher, in an “affirmation of the impossibility of the very affirmation” of reciprocal recognition. This paradoxical, dramatic formulation might be, I contend, softened: Even though a relation of mutual recognition does inevitably imply risks, tensions and potentials for destabilisation, struggles and subjection, this does not mean that mutual recognition is impossible. The imperfection and precariousness – ambiguity – of love relations based on mutual recognition does not invalidate them completely. As Deutscher herself suggests, ambiguity means, rather, that the other represents “the threat of destabilization of my world” but also “the promise of newness, enrichment, foreignness, surprise, the gift of the unexpected”. Deutscher, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, 43–5.
16. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 95; see also Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 141f.
17. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 100–1.
18. In his fragment on love in the early writings, Hegel states that, in love, “there is a sort of antagonism between complete surrender or the only possible cancellation of opposition (i.e. its cancellation in complete unity) and a still subsisting independence”. G. W. F. Hegel, “Love”, 306. The “union” of the lovers “feels” lovers’ independence as “hindrance”. In Honneth account, the dialectics between dependence (merging, attachment, union) and independence represents on the contrary the condition for a good, fulfilling love relation. My idea of ambiguous love as agonism does not intend to overlook or dismiss the “difficulty” implied in the “antagonism” between independence and dependence; such tension, which might cause more troubles than Honneth seems to think, has to be seen however as the “motor” of free, empowering love.
19. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 105.
20. Ibid., 103.
21. A. Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 151, emphasis added.
22. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 780; 782. In the concluding pages of this work, Beauvoir refers to such communality, oddly enough, with the terms “fraternity” and “brotherhood”.
23. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 82. See also Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas”, 137; Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, 148. An insightful comparison between Beauvoir’s and Arendt’s ideas of freedom is undertaken by Holland-Cunz, Gefährdete Freiheit.
24. Arendt, The Human Condition, 189.
25. Ibid., 190.
26. Ibid., 234–5.
27. Ibid., 242; see also 51–2. On the apolitical quality of a certain type of love and intimacy, settled in the “salon”, and its gendered character in the book Rahel Varnhagen, see Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Chapter 1. As mentioned before, however, the conviction that love is “unworldly” is challenged by Beauvoir’s conception of love as “enrichment of the universe” (Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 723). Arendt comes close to Beauvoir in a beautiful passage of her diaries, dated 1953, where she suggests that, precisely because lovers do not have an object (they do not objectify each other) and do not have a world, love is capable to “create a new world”; Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, 372 ff. On this Arendt’s text, see Thomä, “Passion Lost, Passion Regained”.
28. See e.g. Arendt, On Revolution, 60.
29. Tatjana Noemi Tömmel, however, has brilliantly shown how in Arendt’s ouvre there can be found various notions of love, and at least some of these cannot be considered apolitical tout court: Tömmel, Liebe als Wille und Passion. On the compatibility of Arendt’s reflections on power and violence with a Hegelian framework, see Zambrana, “Logics of Power, Logics of Violence (According to Hegel)”.
30. Amy Allen describes Arendt’s notion of power as “power with”; Allen, The Power of Feminist Theory.
31. One might object that passion, which implies self-forgetfulness and self-obliteration, is a constitutive or at least a very often experienced trait of love. I do not want to deny that: The aim of the present paper is, however, that of developing a critical-theoretical approach to love relations, an approach that should allow to detect those relational structures that structurally make self-forgetfulness and self-obliteration harmful for certain categories of people (paradigmatically, but not only, women). At the same time, I do also want to outline an account of love not reducible to damaged structures.
32. I share with Amy Allen the conviction that a theory of power, which intends to be useful, among other things, for feminist theories, is constituted by the interplay of different accounts of power, such as power to, power over and power with: Allen, The Power of Feminist Theory, 129.
33. See e.g. Wartenberg, The Forms of Power.
34. An example: After the Second World War, Sartre tries to persuade de Beauvoir to participate in the many political activities in which he is deeply involved. In the very beginning, she is reluctant and sceptical, as her main desires and projects lie in the literary and philosophical fields, and she just does not see how she could ever find satisfaction and self-fulfillment in politics. After a while, she finds her own way, different from Sartre’s, to act politically, namely as feminist. One could say that Sartre’s power over de Beauvoir that made her engage in activities alien to her original idea of self-realisation allows her to find a new powerful and autonomous way of self-expression and engagement.
35. In other words, I do not want to deny that power over can be exerted also in manipulatory, subjugating ways: In this negative sense, power over is aimed at suppressing and not at enabling the other’s agency and power.
36. Arendt, On Violence, 52.
37. Arendt, The Human Condition, 201.
38. Ibid., 175.
39. Arendt, On revolution, 181.
40. Arendt, The Human Condition, 201.
41. It is important to remark that the power dynamic does not have to be tout court equated with the relation of love. Intimacy is more than that: Moments of fusion or sharing of activities and emotions, for instance, cannot be described by relying on the power vocabulary.
42. Bonnie Honig’s agonist interpretation of Arendt has inspired the conception of agonist love I have presented in these pages: Honig, “Towards an Agonistic Feminism”. Her reading interprets power in concert (power with) as resting upon and at the same time enhancing (and transforming) individual differences and competition, controversies, struggles between individuals acting in concert; what is more, her view allows to challenge Arendt’s separation between the public and the private realm. An agonistic view of love suggests, moreover, that love relations are creative, productive and transformative in ways that, unfortunately, cannot be further investigated in this article.
43. For another conception of ambiguous, or ambivalent recognition, also with reference to love and care, see Thompson and Hoggett, “Misrecognition and Ambivalence”.
44. The late Foucault’s distinction between power and domination might be useful for further clarifying the constellation of concepts I am formulating and drawing upon in this last part of the paper. On the one hand, power’s exercises always imply, according to Foucault, freedom and thus forms of counterpower; domination, on the other hand, designates a situation in which relations of power appear as stable, irrevocable, frozen, reified; see Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom”.
45. Jessica Benjamin presents this split as result of gender dichotomy: see in particular Benjamin, The Bonds of Love.
46. In this paper, I have complied with the problematic traditional picture of monogamic love relations, which unfortunately cannot be critically discussed here, but it should.
47. Consider for example a love relation between a young, working class man and an upper-class woman in her 40es: Assume the man is economically dependent on the woman, while she emotionally depending on him for satisfying her desire for reproduction. Without going into the concrete details, it is difficult to decide whose dependence is granting more power over, and to whom.
48. See Gregoratto, “Love is a Losing Game”. Inquiries of this sort require a fourth conception of power besides power to, over and with. This fourth conception might be called “constitutive power” and corresponds to those norms and social structures that constitute individuals’ identities and patterns of social relations in ways that are more harmful, discriminating, oppressive for certain categories of people than for others. For critical accounts of how gender and class norms skew relations of love as recognition, see e.g. McNay, “Social Freedom and Progress in the Family”; Allen “Recognizing Domination”.
49. Arendt, On Violence, 53.
50. Arendt, The Human Condition, 203.
51. Arendt, On Violence, 53.
52. Arendt, The Human Condition, 201.
53. Domestic violence perpetrated on female by male partners represent the most obvious reference here; only one reference: Council of Europe, Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence. See also Gregoratto, “Why Love Kills”. In empirical diagnoses, the object of violence should be characterised not only on the basis of gender but also of other factors, like e.g. race, class, age, etc.