The Procedures of Love

<p>Here’s a puzzle about love. Love is an event that arrives from the outside and breaks time in two. It shatters the structures of the world you knew and creates a new world. In love, you lose yourself and gain a new being, a new body, remade. And yet if love were really an event in this sense, outside time, it would be unlivable. It is almost impossible even to breathe during such a tumultuous transformation.</p> <p>But love also has another, seemingly opposite, face. Love is a bond, the strongest bond that you can experience, which holds you in relation to others. Love binds you in a way that feels as if it will last forever. This face of love, too, seems to be outside time, cast in the realm of the eternal, and thus equally unlivable, suffocating. The immutable bond of a warm embrace quickly becomes an unbearable, airless prison.</p> <p>That’s the difference, you might respond, between <em>falling in love</em> and <em>being in love</em>. But separating love in this way does nothing to solve the puzzle. You are simply left with two notions of love that are equally unlivable—one outside time in the sense that it is all change and the other outside time in that it admits none.</p> <p>What we need to discover instead is a love that is in time, a love that has both the transformative powers of the event and the duration of the bond.</p> <p>My primary aim is to develop a political concept of love or, rather, to understand how love can be the central, constitutive mode and motor of politics. In the past, love has sometimes been conceived of as a political force, but today it is almost completely isolated within the private and intimate sphere. In order to create a political concept and practice of love today, one must extend it beyond the couple and the family to the entire social field…</p>