‘I would rather waitfor you than believethat you are notcoming at all’:Revolutionary love in apost-revolutionary time

Robyn MarascoDepartment of Political Science, Hunter College, CUNY, New York, USA

AbstractThis article examines the return of love in contemporary critical theory. While recent attempts tomake sense of a politicized concept of love have focused on its reconciliatory promise for our age,this article considers love as a discourse of edification for a frustrated political subject, one whoseradical hopes have been forged in waiting. Those who want to resist the idea that the revolutionaryhorizon has for ever receded can be easily tempted and sometimes blindly seduced by the force oflove. As an upbuilding discourse, the political appeal to love betrays a profound religiosity and afrustrated longing for transcendence, but it functions, also, to feminize political subjectivity,rendering it passive and wholly derivative of the dominant order. Marx’s attack on communistlovesickness and Beauvoir’s portrait of the grande amoureuse provide touchstones for a feministcritique of love, one that refuses its seductions without wholly dispensing with its critical andutopian dimension. Other critical theorists, notably Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno,intimate how love furnishes, not the affective grounds for political practice, but the recollection of apoetics of thinking.

KeywordsSimone de Beauvoir, Empire, gender, left melancholy, love, Karl Marx, multitude, political theology,waiting

Corresponding author:

Robyn Marasco, Hunter College, CUNY Department of Political Science, New York, NY 10021, USA

Email: rmarasco@hunter.cuny.edu

Philosophy and Social Criticism36(6) 643–662

ª The Author(s) 2010Reprints and permission:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0191453710366213

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643

The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.

(Roland Barthes)

The woman in love, much more grievously than the wife, is one who waits.

(Simone de Beauvoir)

Still at the risk of seeming ridiculous, one cannot but concur with Che Guevara that the

true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.1 This conviction is as ancient as

Socrates, but has proven a steady source of upbuilding and edification for revolutionary

consciousness throughout the modern period.2 From Alexandra Kollontai’s feminist

reconstruction of ‘Red Love’, to Gandhi’s anti-colonial philosophy of non-violence, to

the radical reinterpretation of the figure of Christ in Liberation Theology (and Pasolini’s

The Gospel According to St Matthew), to Marcuse’s recuperation of eros against the bar-

baric march of civilization, revolutionary love has assumed a variety of forms in the past

century alone. And it has been given new life in radical political thought; Toni Negri and

Michael Hardt are its most unabashed of recent champions, but the echoes of amor rever-

berate elsewhere, typically under the banner of political theology. Others, including

Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou and Terry Eagleton, have drawn from a political theology

of love to refresh the radical imagination and renew the revolutionary project in the pres-

ent.3 Despite substantial differences among these thinkers, each of whom develops dis-

tinct analytics of love with varied genealogies and philosophical touchstones, all

converge on the radical affirmation of the priority of love. Why love stories? Why now?

What critical sense might be made of the resurrection of revolutionary love in what has

been described as our decidedly post-revolutionary time?

Recent attempts to make sense of the return of love in political thought have focused

almost exclusively on its promise of a communitarian ethic for our age, its reconciliatory

function amid the deracinations of the global political economy and the diremptions of

collective life.4 On this view, love fills in the void left by the collapse of ‘actually exist-

ing’ socialisms and offers an antidote to the political and existential sicknesses suffered

by the alleged triumph of cold-hearted capitalism. This article, too, proceeds in diagnos-

tic vein, though steers a somewhat different course and takes its bearings from the open-

ing epigraphs. From Beauvoir and Barthes, we learn that the lover is, above all, a figure

whose fatal identity lies in waiting. A figuration neither of reconciliation nor redemption,

the lover is constituted through the long wait for her beloved and is quite literally con-

demned to the wait as the proof of her enduring love. For Barthes, the lover’s discourse

of waiting is a utopian one; for Beauvoir, it is that endless and empty expanse of time

suffered by those confined to rather unhappy circumstances. Both might be right, and

while much of what follows is an attempt to deepen and refine Beauvoir’s critique of

love and mobilize it against the return to amor in contemporary political thought, I can-

not fully dispense with the utopian element harbored in love, even as I attempt to recast

and refigure it. For both thinkers, the lover’s discourse is a feminine (and feminizing)

one, the language of the one who waits and the lyric of being made feminine. If love

is, indeed, bound up with a posture of waiting, Che Guevara’s celebrated confession can

now appear in a somewhat different light: the true revolutionary today is guided by great

644 Philosophy and Social Criticism 36(6)

644

feelings of love, for the true revolutionary is the one who waits. The subject revolution-

ary was not born, but has been made woman.

Gender thus plays a crucial role in the supplication to love, though its gendered

dimensions have received little sustained or reflexive attention. Both Zizek and Badiou

signal the ‘feminine’ quality of love; the former drawing from the feminine formula of

sexuation in Lacan, the latter by an insistence that, through love, ‘contemporary philo-

sophy addresses itself at all times to women’.5 Yet neither seems especially troubled by

the (masculinist?) identification of universal love with the feminine, nor do they regard

the feminization of revolutionary possibility as a symptom of – and hardly anything like a

solution for – political frustration and despair. Badiou, for instance, admits that this phi-

losophical address to women, this discourse on love, is ‘partly a strategy of seduction’,

though this seducer’s diary contains promises of that ever allusive and enticing term,

humanity.6 It invites the philosopher to strike a feminine pose by way of amorous attach-

ment to the three pillars of philosophical inquiry, what he calls the ‘truth-procedures’ of

science, art and politics. When Badiou claims that ‘[it] is from the bias of love that phi-

losophy touches upon the sexes’, he reproduces a familiar set of conceits, namely that

there is some essential link between the force of love and the feminine subject.7 It is

as if these truth-procedures could not ‘touch upon the sexes’ without the feminizing labor

of love, as if science, art and politics do not enjoin us as (gendered) subjects in ways that

outstrip and subvert the philosopher’s address. Because it is love, Badiou suggests,

philosophy is a ‘womanly’ enterprise. Feminist critics might fear that this is an all-

too-familiar strategy of seduction.

Hardt and Negri, in providing an ostensibly de-gendered account of multitudinal love

that does not presume amor to be an essentially feminine ordeal, offer what is in some

ways a more challenging opportunity for feminist analysis. While feminist political the-

orists have demonstrated the extent to which Hardt and Negri mythologize ‘male heroes

and masculinist modes of resistance and revolution’, I suspect that the gendered ontology

of the multitude is more vexing than any simple story of female exclusion and under-

representation suggests.8 Indeed, it is the ‘feminine’ quality of the multitude, even more

than its patent masculinism, that might give us pause. Beauvoir furnishes an invaluable

touchstone here, as it is the pejoratively feminizing quality of love that she (along with

later second-wave feminist theorists) regarded as the ultimate betrayal of an emancipa-

tory political project. The woman in love, for Beauvoir, is a figure caught in the diremp-

tions of unhappy consciousness, unable to relinquish her desire for transcendence and yet

condemned to immanence. Her comportment is one of surrender and self-annihilation, of

idolatrous devotion to her beloved lived as permanent and frustrated waiting. Even as she

was chiefly concerned with torments of an individual nature, Beauvoir holds a mirror to

the amorous multitude and her portrait of the grande amoureuse is, therefore, worth

revisiting.

Those who want to resist the idea that the revolutionary horizon has for ever receded

(and I include myself here) can be easily tempted and sometimes blindly seduced by the

force of love. This drama of seduction is as much religious as it is romantic, though the

religiosity of love inheres not in its explicitly Christian character. Indeed, love appears in

its real religiosity at the moment it sheds these trappings, when it becomes a ‘secular’

discourse of edification for a political identity forged in waiting.9 When the long wait

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for a radically transformed future appears as the supreme labor of love, when a ‘worldly

concept of love’ itself bestows meaning, purpose and validation upon this wait, politics

becomes religion by other means.

Let me be precise here. I am not disavowing the theological traces that circulate in our

‘secular’ political concepts, nor should my claim concerning the religiosity of revolu-

tionary love be mistaken for yet another defense of secular reason against the onslaughts

and incursions of religious faith. I do not mean to deny the force of love in the human

capacity to imagine alternative social arrangements and to work toward a more substan-

tially just and humane world, nor do I intend to stake out a position against love in pol-

itics by propping up a purified conception of ‘the political’ and relegating the experience

of love to the ‘merely’ private or intimate domains of life.10 Rather, I want to resist the

upbuilding and edifying work of love by inquiring into the conditions under which love

enjoys renewal as a political category and the effects that ‘learning to love again’ might

have on radical political thought and practice.11 I suspect that the renewal has much to do

with political exhaustion and despair, while its effects might be a specifically gendered

sort of left-wing melancholy. Before turning to Beauvoir, let me first detail the peculiar

lovesickness to which the revolutionary imagination is prone.

Multitudinous amor, or how communism became lovesick

Multitude, Hardt’s and Negri’s postscript to their explosive work on Empire, reads as a

protracted commandment to love, one that is especially seductive in its readiness to con-

jure the revolutionary force of an amorous multitude from within the present configura-

tions of global power. Love is recast by Hardt and Negri as the commandment we give to

ourselves, uttered in joy and elation – the good conscience of ‘communists like us’.

While Empire was hailed as a rewriting of the Communist Manifesto for our time, this

more recent work is perhaps closer in spirit and in substance to Feuerbach’s The Essence

of Christianity, with its elevation of love to its supreme status as the moral compass

and material engine of humanity.12 Engels’ critique of the commandment to love in

Feuerbach is worth recalling here, insofar as it attends to the profound religiosity latent

in German Idealism:

But love! – yes, with Feuerbach, love is everywhere and at all times the wonder-working

god who should help to surmount all difficulties of practical life – and at that in a society

which is split into classes with diametrically opposite interests. At this point, the last relic of

the revolutionary character disappears from his philosophy, leaving only the old cant: Love

one another – fall into each other’s arms regardless of distinctions of sex or estate – a uni-

versal orgy of reconciliation!13

Notwithstanding the sexual panic that underwrites Engels’ retort, his treatment of

Feuerbach turns on the deeply conservative retreat from the irreconcilable conflicts in

a class society into the warm embrace of universal religion. But it is the ‘Circular against

Kriege’, written in response to the German journalist Hermann Kriege, and initially

intended for inclusion in the second volume of The German Ideology, that offers most

striking polemic against the revolutionary appeal to love. In it, Marx and Engels consider

646 Philosophy and Social Criticism 36(6)

646

‘how communism became lovesick’ in the figure of Kriege, who emigrated to New York

City in 1845 and outlined the tenets of a ‘true socialism’ founded on the powers of

love.14 A brief look at the ‘Circular against Kriege’ will provide a glimpse into the long

and embattled history of love in revolutionary politics and confirm its gendered

dimensions.

The ‘Circular’ responds to a series of articles written by Kriege in Volks-Tribun, but

begins with a detailed consideration of one article, entitled ‘An die Frauen’ and

addressed in particular to women. Marx and Engels note that love appears in 35 different

forms in this single piece, in which Kriege names himself an ‘apostle of love’ and

describes women as ‘the true priestesses of love’, in whom the harbored image of the

communist future lies.15 Here is Kriege to women: ‘[You] have a most mighty voice

in politics too. You but need to use your influence, and all the old kingdom of hatred will

fall in ruins to make way for the new kingdom of love.’ This solicitation for the feminine

voice of love in politics combines effusive sentimentality and deep religiosity to ‘hood-

wink’ those it aims to address.16 To the apostle’s commandment that women be

‘‘‘unstinting’’ in their love so that it may ‘‘embrace all mankind with equal surrender’’’,

Marx and Engels respond that such ‘a demand is as indecent as it is extravagant’ insofar

as it requires of women an unflinching devotion to the very circumstances of their

oppression. Kriege asks, ‘What is a woman without the man whom she can love, to

whom she can surrender her trembling soul?’ and here Marx and Engels locate the pathos

of surrender that underwrites a lovesick communism. Beneath this ‘amorous slobbering’

is an infelicitous attempt to resuscitate religion as the true heart of communism and ren-

der revolutionary possibility a matter of pious faith and purity of heart.

For Marx and Engels, lovesick communism can have only ‘an enervating effect on

both sexes’ as it positions both men and women bent down on their knees, assuming a

devotional posture toward the very conditions of existence that keep them unfree. They

conclude this first section of the ‘Circular’ by highlighting

... the cowardice with which [Kriege] panders to the usurper by promising to let him keep

what he already has and with which further on he assures that he does not want ‘to destroy

the cherished sentiments of family life, of belonging to one’s native land and people’ but

‘only to fulfill them’. This cowardly, hypocritical presentation of communism not as

‘destruction’ but as ‘fulfillment’ of existing evils and of the illusions which the bourgeoisie

have about them, is found in every issue of the Volks-Tribun.

Here Marx and Engels anticipate both the feminist critique of the bourgeois family and

the radical assault on sentimental love. Kriege’s is the communism of coquettish flattery

and flirtation, an attempt to ingratiate communism with the ruling classes. What feminist

critics will add to their analysis is an appreciation of how (gendered) subjectivity is itself

produced through this dialectic of surrender and fulfillment.

While a full survey of Marx’s views on love is beyond my scope in this article, suffice

it to say that his writings reveal a deep suspicion of communist lovesickness, even if they

do not provide a full diagnosis. In a sense, then, I aim to be more scrupulously diagnostic

on the theme of communist lovesickness by posing the question – ‘‘Why now?’’ – while

drawing upon Marx for theoretical insight into the promises and pitfalls of a politics of

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love. The Holy Family, in particular its fourth chapter, presents a somewhat different

analysis of love and complicates the story immensely; in it, Marx aims to critique the

‘tranquility of knowledge’ characteristic of Cultural Criticism. In order to dispose of

love, which it must if it is to complete its transition to perfectly tranquil knowledge, Cul-

tural Criticism transforms love into a cruel and intemperate goddess and thereby severs

passion from the realm of the properly human. In attempting a critique of what he mock-

ingly calls Critical Criticism, Marx is less concerned to resurrect love than to diagnose

the maneuvering whereby it is transformed into a theological category, feminized and

demonized as ‘‘‘the maid from a foreign land’’ who has no dialectical passport and is

therefore expelled from the country by the Critical police’.17 For Marx in The Holy Fam-

ily, love appears not as a spiritual bond or as the hidden essence of humanity, but as the

real sensuous and material experience of everyday life. Cultural Criticism maintains the

idealist fictions of love and is, therefore, a kind of reverse-image of lovesick commun-

ism. In the former, love appears as a demonic feminine who demands everything from

man to the point of his self-immolation and suicide. In the latter, and its perfect comple-

ment, love appears as a virgin goddess who gives all to humanity and expects nothing in

return. Marx subjects both views to his characteristically ruthless critique, and his own

writings on love disrupt the familiar tendency to regard the revival of love as the analy-

tical and affective placeholder for a Marxist communitarian vision that has fallen into

disrepair.18 For Marx, a revolutionary politics under the spell of amor betrays a latent

religiosity, one that is not quite reducible to the remnants of Christian theology in

German Idealism. Rather, the religiosity of revolutionary love resides in the posture

of surrender that it invariably commands.

Hardt and Negri work under this spell, recasting love as the joyful passion of revolt

against the present configurations of power and the emotive bond for a new International.

Pace Arendt, who describes love in The Human Condition as ‘not only apolitical, per-

haps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces’, Hardt and Negri regard amor

as fundamentally and unrelentingly political, that which establishes the field of common

praxis and which signals the time for revolution.19 A political concept of love, they

insist, does not imply the cancellation or subordination of our private desires or our per-

sonal affections, but rather the extension and intensification of those passions now

restricted to the narrow confines of the bourgeois nuclear family. As they put it: ‘We

need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death.

This does not mean that you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It

only means that your love does not end there.’20

It should be noted here that a political concept of love begins (even if it does not end)

with an idealized image of the family, a staple of republican political thought. At the

same time, Hardt and Negri deem such familial love as inadequate and limited: a polit-

ical concept of love involves a movement beyond familial attachments, a movement into

the ‘public sphere’ that, although substantially different from the Habermasian public

sphere, rests upon a similar structure of fantasy with regard to a democratic past that

never was. While Spinoza provides Hardt and Negri with the link between love and the

constituent power of the multitude, their appeal to Machiavelli’s republicanism and a

concept of love that circulates in Renaissance political thought serves to politicize these

amorous tonalities. Putting to one side the imperial ambitions that have accompanied the

648 Philosophy and Social Criticism 36(6)

648

republican tradition since its inception, Hardt and Negri mine from republicanism an

ideal of amor patriae, which they regard as indispensable to an insurgent politics of the

multitude. Yet amor patriae undergoes substantial renovation in this joyful affirmation,

as it is ‘not really tied to any country’s institutions or even national identity’ and instead

‘transmutes into amor humanitas, a love of humanity, exceeding any and all nations’.21

What they fail to consider is the possibility that amor patriae cannot be universalized

without relinquishing its political claim. In other words, they do not show how love

might assume a real political force that pertains to humanity as a whole, which would

require an admission that the world is not such a loving place. Claiming amor humanitas

to be the ‘constitutive praxis of the common’ and the immanent countervailing force of

Empire, Hardt and Negri presume the affective orientation that they also seek to mobi-

lize.22 This force of love, which ‘emerges out of the ontological and social process of

productive labor’, is transformed into a political act and an ongoing creative activity

when it ‘serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction

of a new society’.23 Against the localist preoccupations in many quarters of left political

theory and practice, Hardt and Negri seek to recast a new International on the constituent

power of the multitude, mobilizing the force of love to refashion political subjectivity

and remake the world. Without this constructive force of love, Hardt and Negri insist,

‘we are nothing’. Yet, if love is precisely what ‘we, the multitude’ have been doing all

along, then politics appears to demand little more than an honest ontology of ourselves.

As to whether republicanism can, in fact, anchor such a diffuse and nebulous amor

humanitatas, I have serious doubts. More importantly, this weak republicanism does not

simply transform the love of one’s country into a (diluted) love of humanity; it constructs

the immanent field of global power relations as a world family, beset by internal quarrels

and conflicts but which, taken as a whole, points to the constituent power of love.

This is the upbuilding discourse of amor, which its most recent apostles deliver in the

form of an order, a directive, a commandment:

The golem, the monster of war, does not know the friend–enemy distinction. War brings

death to all equally. That is the monstrosity of war. ... Perhaps we need to listen more atten-

tively to the golem’s message. The most remarkable thing about the golem in many of the

modern versions is not its instrumentality or its brutality but its emotional neediness and

capacity for affection. The golem does not want to kill, it wants to love and be loved.24

Here Empire’s monster is transfigured into the multitude’s rescuing angel, whose mes-

sage of our ‘possible redemption through love’ comes in the form of a whispered

secret.25 Indeed, our golem of global warfare is no monster at all. Rather, it displays the

tantrums and outbursts of a needy and wounded ‘unrequited’ lover. It does not want to

kill; it wants to love and needs to be loved. ‘Under the din of our global battlefield’, the

golem of war enjoins humanity to love again, to love itself and to love the world (12).

To be sure, war does not bring death to all equally, and so perhaps amor cannot be

expected from all equally. Its ravages are shouldered primarily by the poor, the disen-

franchised, the dispossessed, and the displaced. That Empire itself harbors this muted

commandment to love forces us to consider the possibility that this ‘monster’ is a power

that has learned, contra Machiavelli, that it is better to be loved than feared. More to the

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point, might it be that the neo-liberal state and capitalist political economy does its work

through the complex interactions of love and fear, still facing hatred as its worst enemy?

That fear and love are coupled – even as they are pried apart and presented as an

either/or choice for the ruler who cannot have both – suggests that they must be thought

(if not felt) together. From Machiavelli, we learn that both fear and love are irreducibly

political passions, not simply because all passions have their political effects, but

because both bring the people into a political relation with its ruling powers. What this

means is that both love and fear serve to orient subjects to power and this power is made

that much more secure by the artful mastery of both passions. Those who can take hold of

the aesthetic dimension in politics – inspiring both fear and love not by way of interest

calculation, but by awe – are particularly well fortified against the tumultuous waves of

discontent and rebellion. Recall that it is neither love nor fear, but hatred that poses the

most direct threat to princely rule.26 This would suggest that the most challenging and

terrifying aspect of Machiavelli’s own secret lesson to the people – that hatred remains

the most potent force against the powers that be – remains untapped in the revolutionary

supplication to amor.

It was perhaps with this in mind that Walter Benjamin lamented ‘the indoctrination

[that] made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice’, for this

was to ‘[cut] the sinews of its greatest strength’.27 In this respect, the ‘struggling,

oppressed class’ that appears in the Theses on the Philosophy of History provides the per-

fect foil to an amorous multitude (and recalls Marx’s own insistence in the ‘Circular

against Kriege’ that communism is a force of destruction against the bourgeois order

of things, not its fulfillment). Benjamin, too, writes of secrets and redemptive power, but

locates them as much in the people’s hatred ‘nourished by the image of enslaved ances-

tors’ as in the philosopher’s love of truth nourished by the image of a brilliant, burning

husk.28 By contrast, amor humanitas commands the multitude to forget its hatred and

fear. Hardt and Negri recast the multitude ‘in the role of redeemer of future generations’

and rewrite the historical script as an uplifting love story. To describe amor – as opposed

to, say, fear and hatred – as the immanent force of global warfare might be to ensure that

these ruling powers ‘will never cease to be victorious’.29

As I suggested above, Beauvoir and Barthes indicate what is at stake in the present

appeal to amor. Having devoted an entire chapter of The Second Sex to the woman in love,

Beauvoir anticipates Barthes’ insistence that the lover’s discourse echoes a certain femi-

nine cry while also furnishing an indispensable touchstone for a contemporary critique

of revolutionary love. For Beauvoir, the grande amoureuse quite concretely lives and dies

by the wait, the ‘long wait’ that has been her whole life. She awaits the reappearance of her

beloved, and in micro-protest against a life of waiting, she makes others wait for her.

Misogynists who accuse woman of always being late thinks she lacks a sense of punctuality

... but she can adjust herself very well to the demands of time. When she is late, she has

deliberately planned to be. Some coquettish women think that they stimulate the man’s

desire in this way and make their presence the more highly appreciated; but in making the

man wait a few minutes, the woman is above all protesting against that long wait: her life.30

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650

Yet these maladjustments to ‘the demands of time’ indicate to Beauvoir the permanent

frustration and pathology in feminine love, itself generated by conditions of domination

and servitude. What Beauvoir furnishes is more than a feminist argument against the

ideology of love; she offers a view of love as ‘unhappy consciousness’ in feminine form.

In a world where she is not sovereign and cannot seize her own freedom, the grande

amoureuse opts to ‘serve a god rather than obey tyrants. . . . Love becomes for her a reli-

gion’ (643).

On Beauvoir’s gloss, the woman in love is a figure of ‘impotent revolt’ and exemplary

of those who attempt ‘to achieve individual salvation by solitary effort’ instead of

working collectively and constructively toward their liberation (627). She is not alone

in these attempts, for there is also the mystic and the narcissist, but in the grande

amoureuse there is a sad coincidence of both mysticism and narcissism. The woman

in love expresses par excellence the attempt ‘to justify [her] existence in the midst

of [her] immanence – that is, to realize transcendence in immanence . . . to transform

her prison into a heaven of glory, her servitude into sovereign liberty’ (628). Might this

feminine form of unhappy consciousness provide a glimpse into the multitude? Indeed,

Hardt and Negri insist ad nauseam that there is no outside, that immanence is irredu-

cible and transcendence the unfortunate holdover from modernist dialectics. What this

means is that the constituent power of the multitude takes its bearings from precisely

those features of Empire that remake the entire surface of the globe into a potential bat-

tlefield. Hatred, fear, violence and permanent warfare are, in essence, the secret work

of amor. Might the desire to recast the global battlefield as a space shot through with

love reproduce the worldly religiosity Beauvoir identifies with the woman in love,

transforming the prison of Empire into the heaven of the multitude? Less the intimation

of a time for revolution than the expression of and edification for the protracted time of

waiting, this supplication to multitudinous love does not simply valorize ‘masculine’

modes of resistance. Rather, the commandment to love the golem of our own creation

functions to feminize political subjectivity, with the multitude portrayed as the birth

mother to Empire and thereby compelled to provide love and nourishment to this needy

and misunderstood monster. Furthermore, multitudinous love implicitly feminizes rev-

olutionary possibility by rendering it passive, thoroughly immanent to and derivative

of Empire, and yet somehow ‘like a gift from heaven’ without a complex history of

struggle, success, and failure.31

That the woman in love assumes a devotional posture toward her beloved indicates

to Beauvoir the structure of desire produced under conditions of dominance, which is

not quite masochistic, but rather ‘a dream of ecstatic union’ with the figure of transcen-

dence (650). That feminine love takes idolatrous forms indicates those perpetually fru-

strated longings for transcendence that cannot escape radical immanence and

contingency. For that reason, ‘it must partake of desperation’ and remains saturated

with despair (658). Beauvoir’s fundamental insight extends to the renewed language

of love – spoken in various dialects, with ‘theological’ or ‘ethical’ or ‘ontological’

accents – in contemporary political theory. What I take from Beauvoir, contra Hardt

and Negri, is a cautionary note: a left that gives itself over to love is one that perpe-

tually risks becoming Empire’s bitch.

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Idolatrous love, or the trouble with being made woman

Beauvoir examines love because she agrees with Nietzsche that men and women love

differently and wants to grasp how and why this is, which has nothing to do with the laws

of nature. Rather, it has everything to do with women’s situation, itself marked by depen-

dence, inequality and subjection. In love, the frustrations and torments of becoming

woman are laid bare. Beauvoir quotes Nietzsche at length (and I will, too):

The single word love in fact signifies two different things for man and woman. What a

woman understands by love is clear enough: it is not only devotion, it is a total gift of body

and soul, without reservation, without regard for anything whatever. This unconditional

nature of her love is what makes it a faith, the only one she has. As for man, if he loves

a woman, what he wants is that love from her; he is in consequence far from postulating

the same sentiment for himself as for woman; if there should be men who also felt that

desire for complete abandonment, upon my word, they would not be men.32

Beauvoir uses this passage in Nietzsche to illustrate a set of ‘truths’ about gendered sub-

jectivity. If woman loves differently, it is for Beauvoir because she is not sovereign, or

has not assumed her sovereignty. Sovereignty allows one to ‘extend a grasp on the world’

and insert oneself into its unfolding through action. Love becomes the only form of faith

available to her absent meaningful freedom.

Woman loves as a creature who cannot do anything, for she is cut off from the pos-

sibilities of the transcendence she so desires. Woman loves, then, to attach herself to the

active, dynamic subject she cannot be, to get as close to the light of transcendence as

possible while shrouded in darkness and ‘doomed to immanence’ (643). Beauvoir

continues:

There is no other way out for her than to lose herself, body and soul, in him who is repre-

sented to her as the absolute, as the essential. Since she is doomed to dependence, she would

prefer to serve a god rather than obey tyrants – parents, husband, or protector. She chooses

to desire her own enslavement so ardently that it will seem to her the expression of her lib-

erty; she will try to rise above her situation as inessential object by accepting it; through her

flesh, her feelings, her behavior, she will enthrone him as supreme value and reality; she will

humble herself to nothingness before him. Love becomes for her a religion. [Emphases

added]

What is significant here is that the woman in love is a figure who is not resigned to her

immanence and dependence. Or, she is, as Beauvoir will say elsewhere, ‘not resigned to

being resigned’. She has not repressed her claim to humanity, but pursues it vicariously

in recognition that she has no other escape from the weight of her imposed fate. Beauvoir

will insist – perhaps to lighten the load of 700 pages of evidence to the contrary – that

emancipation is women’s true historical destiny, but she views love in all its religiosity

as that which consolidates a situation of domination and dependence. Love is the expres-

sion of a certain rescue urge, woman’s desire for some way out of her diremption and

despair. But, alas, she is afforded no salvation through love. And what first might appear

as a pragmatic negotiation with the inevitability of her dependence (‘she would prefer to

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serve a god rather than obey tyrants’) transforms under Beauvoir’s gaze into denial of and

flight from her situation. What might first intimate a rebellion against the tyranny of male

dominance proves to be its deification. In making a religion of love and an idol of her

beloved, ‘she chooses not to revolt against him . . . but she revolts against herself’ (651).

Beauvoir has learned much from both Hegel and Nietzsche: from Hegel, she under-

stands that the denial of subjectivity performed by unhappy consciousness functions to

recenter the very subject denied; from Nietzsche, she appreciates that this ‘dream of

annihilation is in fact an avid will to exist’ (646). The great lover makes an idol of her

beloved in hopes that her devotion will secure her salvation. Abandoning herself to noth-

ingness before him, she hopes to merge with him and the transcendence he represents.

Hence, her self-annihilation has an illusory character; it is an attempt ‘to attain supreme

existence through losing oneself in the other’ (649).

The woman in love strikes Beauvoir as a ‘ridiculous, often pathetic’ creature (628).

This is for several reasons. First, the lover mistakes self-annihilation for fulfillment of

freedom. Second, the raptures of love can offer only an illusory transcendence – illusory

because it is not actually hers, because she does not take possession of it, because she

enjoys it only in the form of a temporary escape and anonymity. Here is Beauvoir again:

. . . the act of love requires of woman profound self-abandonment; she bathes in a passive

languor; with closed eyes, anonymous, lost, she feels as if borne by waves, swept away in a

storm, shrouded in darkness: darkness of the flesh, of the womb, of the grave. Annihilated,

she becomes one with the Whole, her ego is abolished. But when the man moves from her,

she finds herself back on earth, on a bed, in the light: she again has a name, a face: she is one

vanquished, prey, object. (648)

The dream of merging with her beloved is invariably interrupted by the nightmare of

dominance and dependence. But the paradox runs deeper: the grande amoureuse, in

making an idol of her beloved, keeps him – and the promise of transcendence he embo-

dies – forever beyond her grasp. She cannot possess him. But her fulfillment and her hap-

piness require possession. Hence, idolatrous love has a deeply paradoxical character. She

is promised everything in love and loses everything in losing it. She must possess him,

but to possess him is to destroy her idol, to strip her beloved of his sacred qualities. The

woman in love, circling in desperate paradox, can do nothing but wait.

Beauvoir admits that ‘waiting can be a joy’, but only when accompanied by the con-

fidence that the absent object will appear (662). Without such confidence (or with its dis-

sipation), the wait itself keeps her chained to a condition of frustrated and tormented

desire. Beauvoir again, in a particularly suggestive passage:

The life of Juliette Drouet is one of those most remarkable examples of entire, lifelong devo-

tion: it was one long wait. ‘I wait like a squirrel in a cage . . . I wait for you because, after

all, I would rather wait for you than believe that you are not coming at all,’ and so on inde-

finitely. (661)

Drouet waits for Victor Hugo, in particular, though her letters suggest an attachment to

the wait for its own sake, for the torment of waiting is itself the proof of her fidelity. ‘She

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653

wrote him seventeen thousand letters, at the rate of three hundred to four hundred

yearly’, for Drouet opts to record this wait rather than entertain the thought that her

beloved will never arrive (662). One reason why the epistolary form – and not the man-

ifesto, the polemic, or even the poem – is best suited for the lover’s discourse is that it

presupposes a certain structure of waiting; for the time and repose to write one’s love, for

confirmation that the letter has been received, for some response from the addressee. The

letter functions both as written proof of her enduring love (the time she has given to love)

and as the chain that keeps her bound to her beloved (the time she will spend in waiting

for a reply). But, more importantly, it enables her to take flight from the real possibility

that her beloved will never come, that her love – and her life spent in waiting – is in vain.

Without love, she is nothing. And yet the force of amor cannot secure an end to the wait;

indeed, it is precisely what allows her wait to endure, what gives meaning and purpose to

an otherwise restless and anguished boredom.

I would rather wait for you than believe that you are not coming at all. In some ways,

Drouet’s words contain the desperate admission that Hardt and Negri dare not utter in

their appeal to the revolutionary force of love. Unrequited love, which for Hardt and

Negri is the secret whisper that commands the multitude to listen more closely to the

golem’s message, is a more complicated and ambivalent comportment than their joyful

affirmation would seem to suggest. It is, admittedly, a stubborn defiance of pure resig-

nation to the belief that what is hoped for will not arrive. In this way, the political appeal

to love, at the limits of ‘reasonable’ expectation or confidence, taps the utopian imagin-

ary in political thinking, without which hope for the future dissolves. Yet, in not being

resigned to resignation, the grande amoureuse flirts not simply with the promise of trans-

cendence (a promise that Hardt and Negri relentlessly disavow, but which I suspect is the

‘bad conscience’ of ‘communists like us’), but with a life mired in pure immanence and

arrested in permanent waiting.

In one of those elusive figures in The Lover’s Discourse, Barthes writes the following:

Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by Woman: Woman is sedentary, Man

hunts, journeys; Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is

Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she

weaves and she sings. . . . It follows that in man who utters the other’s absence something

feminine is declared: this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously

feminized. A man is not feminized because he is inverted but because he is in love. (Myth

and utopia: the origins have belonged, the future will belong to the subjects in whom there is

something feminine.)33

Barthes here draws upon the feminine figure of love, not to record the lover’s discourse

as woven and sung by the grande amoureuse, but to tap the utopian imaginary harbored

in the stationary and sedentary feminine. Presumably, Penelope is one figure Barthes has

in mind and she, of course, wove day and night. Yet Barthes’ appropriation is a troubling

move in many ways, for it functions to recenter the male lover as author of the future, the

man in whom there is ‘something feminine’ but for whom we could never mistake a

woman. Woman remains a figure of the past, a figure of origin, and in her is the intima-

tion of a future that will be authored by the man in love. Here we also find a ‘queer’

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recuperation of the old patriarchal myth that women wait in lonely but faithful anguish

for the return of their beloved hunters and bread-winners, that their domicile is an empty

one while the men are away, that the milkman (not to mention the wife next door) never

makes his way through the side door. Or, in Penelope’s case, the resolute deflection of

endlessly available suitors and erotic possibilities becomes the mark of her steadfastness

and strength. Beauvoir’s fundamental insight, that women’s subjectivity and historical

agency are betrayed by the very discourse that appears most their own, might be usefully

brought to bear on Barthes’ own affirmation of love. Extending this insight to the current

priesthood of communist love indicates the pathos of frustration and despair suffered by

a left that lives and dies by the wait.

If Penelope, the weaver, is a figuration of love, this is also the force of love that ani-

mates political thinking. Arendt, who compares the work of theory to Penelope’s daily

weaving and nightly unweaving, confirms the structure of waiting that inheres in thought

itself. This opens up the potential for a fuller engagement with the poetics of thinking,

without conflating the task of political practice with the patient and steadfast labor of

political theory. By way of conclusion, I turn now to the poetics of thinking, upon which

no politics can rest in itself but which no political vision can do without.

Heliotropism, or learning how to wait

‘Perhaps the only remaining attitude is one of waiting. . . . One waits and one’s waiting

is a hesitant openness, albeit of a sort that is difficult to explain.’34 The words of

Siegfried Kracauer ring true today, as they must have in 1922. In an attempt to do justice

to them – indeed, an explanation of what is entailed in this ‘hesitant openness’ is beyond

my theoretical reach – I want to conjure another figuration of love, one that seizes upon

the utopian potential harbored in the wait without resting a politics on the fragile arrows

of amor. It comes from Kracauer’s friend and fellow traveler, Theodor Adorno, and from

his melancholy reflections on damaged life.

Several aphorisms in Minima Moralia tarry with the antinomies of love. In Constanze,

Adorno wrestles with the bourgeois conceit that love is a uniquely involuntary experi-

ence, a ‘pure immediacy of feeling’ that comes and goes with the unthought ebb and flow

of passions.35 For Adorno, this bourgeois idea of love appears to offer reprieve from the

principle of bourgeois society – in particular, the priority of work and the fetish of the

will, the primacy of interest and calculation, the reduction of quality into quantity – but

only strengthens its hold on all domains of life. Bourgeois love ‘in the guise of unreflect-

ing spontaneity and proud of its alleged integrity, relies exclusively on what it takes to be

the voice of the heart, and runs away as soon as it no longer thinks it can hear that voice,

is in this supreme independence the tool of society’.36 Independence is itself the sacred

cow of bourgeois capitalism, but as the guiding principle of love it consolidates passive

submission to the social domination of interests. Here Adorno will argue that a recon-

structed idea of fidelity provides a counterweight to societal imperatives – ‘recon-

structed’ insofar as fidelity functions to negate human freedom when it is commanded

by society, but is also a practice of insubordination when leveled against the ‘roulette

of interests’. On the promise harbored in fidelity to love and to the loved one, Adorno

writes:

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655

If love in society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only

by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntariness

that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it.

This is no pure immediacy of feeling, nor a pathway to a redeemed future, but love here

continues to serve as a promise of something better – or, at least, something different.

Voluntary fidelity, which bears witness to the sublimated social pressures that undercut

any pretension to pure spontaneity, is a militant effort to keep hold on this promise. Love

is, then, a negative ideal, not a positive prescription. It bears witness to what is not, as

opposed to offering a picture of what is or what ought to be.

Adorno, in another aphorism entitled Heliotrope, offers a figuration of love that

stands in marked contrast to Beauvoir’s grande amoureuse. The lover is not an adult

woman, but a young boy charmed by a lady visitor to his parent’s home, and Adorno’s

attention to this figure reveals a more generous recuperation of what lies behind

the experience of love – and waiting. The aphorism’s title is significant; it recalls

Benjamin’s fourth thesis on the concept of history:

Class struggle, which for a historian schooled in Marx is always in evidence, is a fight for

crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. But

these latter things, which are present in class struggle, are not present as a vision of spoils

that fall to the victor. They are alive in this struggle as confidence, courage, humor, cunning,

and fortitude, and have effects that reach far back into the past. They constantly call into

question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, what

has been strives to turn – by a dint of a secret heliotropism – toward that sun which is rising

in the sky of history. The historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of

all transformations.37

I suggested earlier that Benjamin’s Theses provide the perfect foil to an amorous politics

of the multitude, though primarily because the affective tonalities of redemptive critique

are far more complex than those affirmed by Hardt and Negri. Adorno’s aphoristic med-

itation on this ‘secret heliotropism’ takes up the experience of love more explicitly. Here

love establishes the scene for a child-like hope of ‘transformed existence’ that can never

come to rest comfortably in any extant amorous relationship. This aphorism also pro-

vides the occasion for a ‘queering’ of Adorno, as it rather beautifully inverts and dis-

places a historical discourse on love that positions woman as stationary and confined

to the household in waiting, while freeing man for the journeys and adventures beyond

the home.

Who is this lady visitor? From where does she come? We know her only through the

boy’s fervent heartbeat as he watches her unpack for her stay at his parents’ house. ‘The

cases with the labels from the Suvretta Hotel and Madonna di Campiglio, are chests in

which the jewels of Aladdin and Ali Baba, wrapped in precious tissues – the guest’s

kimonos – are borne hither from the caravanserais of Switzerland and the South Tyrol

in sleeping-car sedan chairs for his glutted contemplation.’38 The guest stands in for rad-

ical alterity (with all the familiar orientalist trappings), but she is an other who somehow

walks into all that is most familiar and proximate. Invited in through the front door, the

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656

lady visitor shares her travel stories and souvenirs, her gossip and her adventures, and

‘just as fairies talk to children in fairy-tales, the visitor talks seriously without condes-

cension, to the child of the house’.39 In her presence, the boy enjoys entrance into the

‘mighty and mysterious league of the grown-ups’, but she is an adult unlike any he has

known, one who bears the secret of a world beyond his home. Some of Adorno’s words

are worth quoting at length:

For the guest comes from afar. Her appearing promises the child a world beyond the family,

reminding him that it is not the ultimate. ... The soothsaying gypsy, let in by the front door,

is absolved in the lady visitor and transfigured into a rescuing angel. From the joy of prox-

imity she removes the curse by wedding it to the utmost distance. For this the child’s whole

being is waiting, and so too, later, must he be able to wait who does not forget what is best in

childhood. Love counts the hours until the one when the guest steps over the threshold and

imperceptibly restores life’s washed-out colors: ‘Here I am again/returned from the endless

world.’40

Boyhood infatuation is not of the same order as idolatrous love, though Adorno here

suggests that the wait itself might be refigured and recuperated against the pathos that

Beauvoir identifies in feminine love. Adorno is not claiming that an adult life should

be exhausted by the wait; indeed, there is little by way of ethical imperative in the pas-

sage. Rather, Adorno claims only that an inability to wait is a pernicious kind of forget-

fulness, that it relinquishes those childhood dreams of a world beyond and outside of our

own. Love assumes a redemptive role, as the beloved lady visitor transfigures the gypsy

into a rescuing angel, but only by joining what is most distant to that which is near. The

lady visitor, a stranger from the outside world, overturns the domestic scene, and marks

what lies beyond the family. In her lies the promise of something different, a promise that

is neither fully immanent nor transcendent, but still different from a mode of existence

previously understood as universal. And insofar as she is a visitor, the presumption is that

she will not stay; she will not be incorporated into and reconciled with the sphere of

domesticity, the family, the home.

This is not the only place in Adorno’s writings where the figuration of the feminine is

linked to the utopian imaginary, but here we find a counterpoint to Beauvoir’s conviction

that women are the ones who wait. Perhaps there is ‘something feminine’ in those who

do not forget what is best in childhood, but in them there is also the stubborn resistance

against the weight of what is – not in the name of what ought to be, but in the name of that

melancholy recollection of the fleeting and fugitive thought-image of what was and what

might have been.

This article has aimed to take seriously the claim that ‘critique which goes beyond the

spectacle must know how to wait’.41 To tap the wellspring of love as a critical comport-

ment – and not simply as an ontological or ethical category, or as a quasi-religious com-

mandment – demands that we turn our attention to waiting as an ambivalent

disorientation to the present moment occasioned by the near-exhaustion of those political

categories that once provided political thought with its clear subjects and objects, its

coherent vision of the future, and its positive pathway to salvation. If the discourse of

love brings into focus the ‘fatal identity’ of revolutionary political consciousness, it does

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so bearing the untreated wounds of despair. Contra Hardt and Negri, the appeal to

love will not indicate how this wait will unfold in relation to immediate political

events and imperatives, nor will it suggest the affective tonalities of insubordination

and revolt. In short, there is no politics in amor, which is not to say it is anti-

political. Rather, the resurrection of love indicates an urge for rescue from the dir-

emptions and dislocations of late capitalism and global warfare more than any secret

whisper of its immanent undoing. Critical political theory, alert to the task of learn-

ing how to wait, must work against the temptation to find rest and repose in the fatal

identity of the great lover.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Wendy Brown, Mark Reinhardt, Yves Winter, Antonio Vazquez-Arroyo, Nick

Xenos and Theo Davis for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to Samantha

Demby for research assistance.

Notes

1. In what has become his most famous and frequently quoted remark, Che Guevara offers the

following admission: ‘At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that a true revolutionary

is guided by great feelings of love.’ Lest his admirers forget the complexity of revolutionary

affects in guerilla struggle, his opponents are quick to highlight yet another of Che’s quotables:

‘A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.’

2. The philosophical discourse on love begins, of course, with the Greeks. For Jacques Ranciere,

whose work represents the most provocative recent effort to give lie to the philosopher’s labor

of love, it is not philia, but fear and hatred, that have been the most ‘intimate business’ of phi-

losophy since classical antiquity. Philosophy, on Ranciere’s account, finds its origins in aristo-

cratic fear and hatred of the demos, of ‘the great beast of the populace’ that could be tamed only

by the philosopher’s superior knowledge and expertise. Ranciere’s radical challenge to the

western philosophical tradition is beyond the scope of this article, though it seems that even the

philosopher loves in bad faith. See Jacques Ranciere, On the Shores of Politics, trans. L. Heron

(London: Verso, 1995), p. 36, 1.

3. See Zizek’s discussion of Pauline love in The Fragile Absolute – or, Why Is the Christian

Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000) and his more recent essay in Slavoj

Zizek, Eric Santner and Kenneth Reinhardt, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political

Theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Zizek regards Pauline love,

glossed by way of Lacan, as a substantial – if paradoxical – part of the Christian legacy worth

fighting for. Distinguishing Christian love from a pagan notion of ‘universal balance’, Zizek

reclaims a political-theological concept of love that is unilateral, unbalanced, militant, and

even violent. See ‘On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love: an Interview with Sla-

voj Zizek’, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1(2) (Spring 2004): 32–8. In Badiou, love

assumes supreme status – along with science, art and politics – as a procedure by which phi-

losophy grabs hold of truth. Like Zizek, Badiou regards love as a militant force, that which

preserves fidelity to the event and transforms universality into a fighting creed. Yet it is in the

sexuate attestation to amorous truth (which need not involve the actual experience of love)

that the feminine position joins with that of humanity as a whole. See Alain Badiou, ‘What

is Love?’, in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

658 Philosophy and Social Criticism 36(6)

658

Eagleton’s appeal to love owes less to the Pauline tradition and the Lacanian renovation,

instead seizing upon the force of love in (divine) law by means of a revaluation of Christ’s

resurrection. See Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), espe-

cially ch. 1.

4. See David Nirenberg, ‘The Politics of Love and Its Enemies’, Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring

2007): 573–605; and Richard Beardsworth, ‘A Note to a Political Understanding of Love in

our Global Age’, Contretemps 6 (January 2006): 2–10.

5. Badiou, ‘What is Love?’, p. 263.

6. ibid.

7. ibid.

8. Mary Hawkesworth, ‘The Gendered Ontology of Multitude’, Political Theory 34(3) (June

2006): 357–64.

9. Kierkegaard is, of course, the figure in whom love appears as the arduous work of upbuilding

and edification, and for whom love provides the source of all hope. Zizek cites Kierkegaard

approvingly and indicates the extent to which the discourse of love is as much the work of

upbuilding as it is the work of uprooting and uncoupling.

10. This is the Arendtian move, which identifies love as fundamentally ‘antipolitical’ in that it

‘destroys the in-between which [JMO2]relates to and separates us from one another’; Hannah

Arendt,The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 242. Love

might be described on an Arendtian register as secretive passion, expressed in faint whispers

and furtive glances. Love is not, therefore, merely a private or an intimate affair, though it is

perhaps best left to those spheres of life. For Arendt, love is that which seeks to avoid all dis-

closure in public speech: to tell it is to extinguish it.

Recall Arendt’s account of the secret agent in totalitarian regimes, a figure driven by a

deeply perverse identification with the ruling powers and a pathological will to merge with

an anonymous and amorphous mass. Secret agents are lovers of a most dangerous sort. The

secret admirer – an archetypical figure of love in the romantic imagination and exemplary

by Arendt’s own account of love – is a similarly menacing character, whose identity remains

hidden, whose amorous feelings often go undisclosed, and whose covert operations look more

like the work of spies and undercover detectives than those of citizens. Love, precisely in its

worldlessness and its attempts to circumvent disclosure of the what, harbors secrets which

threaten the already fragile space of public appearances. For a concept of the political that pri-

vileges display and visibility – which Arendt’s certainly does even if it is couched in a language

of persona rather than one of authenticity – the secret admirer stands (or, rather, hides) in direct

opposition to the political actor and as a figuration of the anti-politics of love.

I would suggest that Arendt’s hostility to secrets – despite her reluctant recognition of secrecy

as a reservoir of imagination – provides some insight into her profound suspicion of any political

invocation of love. Of course, Arendt’s hostility to love is more generally related to the proble-

matic of worldlessness and her insistence on the multi-perspectival quality of public space. Love

is too private and rare an experience to nourish political action, to be sure. Its secretive quality

confirms not simply the worldlessness of love, but also its deep affinity with totalitarian

impulses.

That said, her rejection of love as a political concept is not without its ambiguities and

tensions, for, as many of her readers have argued, Arendt’s construction of the political is laced

with love. There is, on the one hand, an Aristotelian philia recast as respect and friendship

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‘without intimacy and without closeness’. And there remains, on the other hand, the traces of an

Augustinian caritas, which Arendt connects with the force of willing oneself as part of the

world. One might even argue – recalling Arendt’s initial plan to title her book Amor Mundi –

that the space of the political described in The Human Condition is established by love, which

provides the formal condition of possibility for action even though it is stripped of political

content. While Arendt’s concept of ‘the political’ might seem a promising point of departure for

contemporary critique of revolutionary love, it leaves unaddressed the critical questions that ani-

mate this inquiry (Why love? Why now? What work is love summoned to perform in these dark

times?) and seems to preclude at the onset any attempts to engage the return of love as a political

symptom.

For a useful discussion of Arendt’s views on secret agents in the origins and expansion of

totalitarianism, see Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept

of the Political (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 80. For a more general dis-

cussion of love in Arendt’s political thought, see James R. Martel, Love is a Sweet Chain:

Desire, Autonomy, and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (New York: Routledge, 2001).

11. I take this formulation from the title of an interview with Wendy Brown, in which Timothy

Rayner suggests that the task of left political theory might be that of learning how to love

again, which for him, involves also learning how to wait. See ‘Learning to Love Again: an

Interview with Wendy Brown’, Contretemps 6 (January 2006): 25–42.

12. See Althusser’s superb analysis of Feuerbach. For Althusser, Feuerbach’s communism is the

communism of love and his revolution involves the spilling of love’s secrets (and its blood).

Here is Althusser ventriloquizing Feuerbach (a script immediately familiar to readers of

Multitude):

[The] essence internal to all human relations is love; that is the essence of hate is love; that

the essence of social conflicts and wars is love. Men, as Christ said, know not what they do:

in reality, they love one another and think that they hate one another; that is why they

fight. . . . Men’s political, economic, and ideological conflicts are the quarrels of lovers

who know not that they love. (‘On Feuerbach’: 147–8)

To love – to see love as the concealed truth and the whispered secret of humankind’s

spiritual and material history – is to be a communist. For Althusser, it means that

revolution can only appear as a confessional practice – ‘books and articles in the

press’ which disclose truths hitherto hidden and concealed – and political action

takes form as ‘demystification’. Notwithstanding nods to Machiavelli and Spinoza

(figures dear to Althusser, as well), Negri’s ‘communism’ bears the sweet scent of

Feuerbachian love, which has long managed to make roses of a foul condition.

See Louis Althusser, ‘On Feuerbach’, in The Humanist Controversy and Other

Texts, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2003).

13. Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, ed. C.

P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1941), p. 40.

14. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Circular against Kriege’, in Marx–Engels Collected Works,

1845–1848, vol. 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984), pp. 35–51. While I will focus in par-

ticular on the first section of the ‘Circular’, entitled ‘How Communism Became Love-sick’, it

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is worth mentioning that subsequent sections deal in particular with the agrarian political

economy and the question of communism in America.

15. All quotations are taken from the first section of the ‘Circular against Kriege’, p. 37. Also

available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1846/05/11.htm

16. Even if it stems from wholly continental sources, Kriege’s address to women resonates with

the sentimentalist strain in the American literary tradition, theorized by Lauren Berlant, Mark

Reinhardt, Lee Edleman and others.

17. Karl Marx, The Holy Family or The Critique of Critical Criticism (Moscow: Progress Publish-

ers, 1980), p. 30.

18. See, in particular, Nirenberg, ‘The Politics of Love and Its Enemies’. In what is otherwise a

very astute and sensitive reading of the exclusions and exiles in a politics of love, from Juda-

ism through Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, Nirenberg’s discussion of Marx’s ‘politics of

love’ relies almost exclusively on the latter’s ‘Comments on James Mill’s ‘Elements of Polit-

ical Economy’’’ and offers the somewhat simplistic conclusion that Marx’s ‘communitarian

vision’ is yet another rewriting of Hegel’s Christian love.

19. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 242.

20. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New

York: Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 351–2.

21. ibid., p. 50.

22. For further elaborations on the politics of love and common praxis, see Antonio Negri, Time

for Revolution, trans. M. Mandarini (New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. 195–200.

23. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 352.

24. ibid., p. 11; emphases added.

25. The dialectic of secrecy and disclosure underwrites much of what has been said about love from

its champions and critics alike. Arendt herself claims that love ‘possesses an unequaled power of

self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who’ in the very same text

where she will insist that ‘love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished,

the moment it is displayed in public’ (Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 242, 51).

26. The concept of class hatred, central to an older tradition of Italian Marxism, might be consid-

ered in relation to an insurrectionary left Machiavellianism, but this remains a speculative and

tentative suggestion well beyond the purview of this article.

27. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings, vol. IV, 1938–1940,

trans. E. Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 394.

28. For Benjamin’s reworking of eros in relation to philosophical critique, see his ‘Epistemo-

Critical Prologue’ to The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (New York:

Verso, 1998).

29. ibid., p. 391. Paolo Virno, by contrast to his fellow autonomist, takes fear to be the ambivalent

passion from which the multitude might draw its energy. In this respect, Virno’s work repre-

sents a striking alternative to the multitudinal politics described by Hardt and Negri and, in my

view, a more compelling engagement with the affective ambiguities of global capital. See

Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, trans. I. Bertoletti, J. Cascaito and A. Casson

(New York: Semiotext(e), 2004).

30. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books,

1989), p. 610; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

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31. Ernesto Laclau, ‘Can Immanence explain Social Struggles?’, in Empire’s New Clothes: Read-

ing Hardt and Negri, ed. Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean (New York: Routledge, 2004), p.

28. Laclau’s critique of Hardt and Negri remains among the most incisive and persuasive ones

I have encountered. While I think he is quite right to suggest that Hardt and Negri ‘provide no

coherent account of political subjectivity’, I am trying to suggest that the incoherent intimation

of political subjectivity that they do provide is an implicitly feminizing one.

32. Quoted in The Second Sex, p. 642.

33. Roland Barthes, The Lover’s Discourse, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978),

pp. 14–15.

34. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Those Who Wait’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. T. Y.

Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

35. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott

(New York: Verso, 1978), p. 172.

36. ibid.

37. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, p. 390; emphases added.

38. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 177.

39. ibid.

40. ibid., p. 178.

41. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black and Red, 1983), § 220.

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