In Praise of Love

by Alain Badiou

Love confronts two enemies, essentially: safety guaranteed by an insurance policy and the comfort zone limited by regulated pleasures.

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.

While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist 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 thus disrupted and re-fashioned.

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.

We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.

I am really interested in the time love endures. Let’s be more precise: by “endure” one should not simply understand that love lasts, that love is forever or always. One has to understand that love invents a different way of lasting in life. That everyone’s existence, when tested by love, confronts a new way of experiencing time.

Love, particularly over time, embraces all the positive aspects of friendship but love relates to the totality of the being of the other, and the surrender of the body becomes the material symbol of that totality.

The essence of politics can be subsumed in the question: what are individuals capable of when they meet, organize, think and take decisions? In love, it is about two people being able to handle difference and make it creative. In politics, it is about finding out whether a number of people, a mass of people in fact, can create equality. And just as the family exists at the level of love to socialize its impact, at the level of politics the power of the State exists to repress its enthusiasms.

So unlike love, politics is all about a confrontation between enemies? Well, you know, look, in love, at the absolute difference that exists between two individuals, one of the biggest differences one can imagine, given that it is an infinite difference, yet an encounter, a declaration and fidelity can transform that into a creative existence.

In love, you can find hurdles, be haunted by immanent dramas, but there are in fact, no enemies.

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

Dramas in love are the sharpest experience of the conflict between identity and difference.

Love cannot be reduced to any law. There is no law of love.

Love is the powerful, unchanging element that has structured her apparently catastrophic existence.

That is what the theatre is, in its origins, thinking-in-the body, embodied thought. As we know, there are rehearsals in the theatre. “Let’s do it again”, says the director. Thought doesn’t come easily to the body. The relationship of a thought to space and movement is complicated. It must be at once spontaneous and pre-meditated. This is also what happens in love. Desire is immediately powerful but love also requires care and re-takes. Love knows all about the need for re-working. ‘Tell me again that you love me”, and very often, “Say it better”. And desire begins again. With caresses you’ll hear, if they are driven by love, “More! More!” that moment when the eagerness for physical gestures is reinforced by the insistence of a word, by a constantly renewed declaration.

without love stories, without the struggle to free love from the constraints of family, the theatre does not add up to much.

And the issue of separation is so important in love that one can also define love as a successful struggle against separation.