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In Praise of Love

5 min read

Author: Alain Badiou

summary

Love is a process of constructing and reinventing the world, no longer from the perspective of One but of Two. It begins with chance, which we can then grasp and weave into destiny by working eternity into time through fidelity and happiness. Love is experiencing the panorama of the world through the prism of difference between two people. Real love is never risk-free, for that denies the element of chance necessary for love to grow.

  1. Love Under Threat: there are two main threats to love
    1. The notion of safety-first love
    2. The denial of love’s importance
  2. Philosophers and Love
    1. There are three contradictory philosophical interpretations of love
      1. Romantic: the ecstasy of the encounter
      2. Contractual
      3. Illusion
    2. Love is a quest for the truth through the construction and re-construction of the world on the basis of difference.
  3. The Construction of Love
    1. Love involves Two, representing a separation or disjuncture.
    2. Love begins with “the encounter”, an event that “doesn’t enter into the immediate order of things” (28).
    3. Love takes shape over time.
    4. Sex is the material expression of love; love is not a mere veneer for desire.
    5. Love commits to enduring.
  4. The Truth of Love 6. Love is a two-scene that produces the truth about difference. 7. The chance encounter must be captured into destiny. 8. Fidelity is the defeat of the encounter’s randomness through the birth of a new world. 9. Joy brings eternity into time.
  5. Love and politics
    1. Politics is not about power, but about finding out what a collective group of people is capable of achieving and if they can create equality. It is a point-by-point search for the truth.
    2. Politics commands hatred, not love.
    3. Love must be brought down to earth from transcendence to immanence.
    4. Politics and love are separate, but politics can bring new possibilities for love.
    5. Love is not a possibility, but rather an overcoming of what appears impossible.
  6. Love and Art 6. Love and art allow an event to break through the barrier of existence. 7. There is no law of love; it is asocial. 8. Theatre and love merge body with thought and require care and re-takes, for “Thought doesn’t come easily to the body” (85). 9. Love is a thought that “can bend our bodies and prompt the sharpest torment”; it is not peaceful. 10. Love is the starting point for philosophy.

notes

  • The poetry of existence comes from risk.
  • For Plato, love is an impulse towards the Idea.
  • “I love you” is locking chance into the framework of eternity.
  • 2024-11-02 locking chance into eternity reminds me of The Unbearable Lightness of Being

thoughts

  • Love is a fleeting eternity in which a new world, that one carries with them for life, is constructed.
  • I think it is beautiful to love without expectations. Someone changes your world and leaves a lasting impression. They may be but a fleeting moment, but they leave an enduring impression on the canvas of your life.

highlights

the realm of thought is never sealed off from the violent onslaughts of love – p. 2

The aim is to avoid any immediate challenge, any deep and genuine experience of the otherness from which love is woven – p. 8

Note: On risk-free love. Difference produces meaning.

Transclude of Rainer-Maria-Rilke#418722

The experience of love is an impulse towards something that [Plato] calls the Idea – p. 16

love really is a unique trust placed in chance – p. 17

While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist manner, on particular objects, … love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life thus disrupted and re-fashioned – p. 21

what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be. – p. 22

The fact is she and I are now incorporated into the 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. – p. 26

🔖 Love isn’t simply about two people meeting and their inward-looking relationship: it is a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but from the perspective of Two – p. 29

🔖 The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright – p. 43

Note: the declaration of love is a choice

Love on bended knee is no love at all as far as I am concerned, even if love sometimes arouses passion in us that makes us yield to the love one – p. 67

Strictly speaking, love isn’t a possibility, but rather the overcoming of something that might appear to be impossible… . Love begins when something impossible is overcome – p. 68

Now, when the logic of identity wins the day, love is under threat – p. 98

Note: the problem of today’s politics and society is isolating and villainizing the other rather than embracing risk and difference.

To love is to struggle, beyond solitude, with everything in the world that can animate existence – p. 104

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