In Praise Of Love

by Alain Badiou

The world is full of new developments and love must also be something that innovates. Risk and adventure must be re-invented against safety and comfort.

It is quite true, after all, that sex, however splendid it is and certainly can be, ends in a kind of emptiness. That is really why it is subject to the law of repetition: one must start time and time again. Every day, when one is young! Then love comes to be the idea that something exists in this void, that lovers are linked by something else apart from this relationship that doesn’t exist.

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.

Jealousy is a fake parasite that feeds on love and doesn’t at all help to define it.

But the difference is that in politics we really have to engage with our enemies, whereas in love it is all about dramas, immanent, internal dramas that don’t really define any enemies, though they do sometimes place the drive for identity into conflict with difference. Dramas in love are the sharpest experience of the conflict between identity and difference.

love isn’t a possibility, but rather the overcoming of something that might appear to be impossible.

“Love is a thought”.

“Love what you will never see twice.”

“I love you” becomes: in this world there is the fount you are for my life.