The Political Cause, Love and the Contingent
Florian Maiwald
5 January 2025
During the holiday season, we often recite a series of usual platitudes which claim that these special family-oriented days are the perfect time to calm down and to forget, at least temporarily, the difficult political situation in which we currently find ourselves. We are encouraged to take a hiatus from what is happening on the global stage (in this case the war in the Middle East, the war of aggression against Ukraine, the development of exploitative AI, climate change, etc.) and instead to reflect on what really brings us closer together as human beings - love.
The question to be raised in response to these platitudes is that of whether love and the political can be so strictly separated. To put it theoretically, we could suggest that there might be rather be an important connection between politics and love. The contingency and openness of historical developments - that they are continuous and inevitable - becomes recognizable in the fall that is characteristic of love. To put it simply, love teaches us that there is no utopian closed world away from the ravages and divisions of politics. In love, as in revolutions and reforms, there is of course always the risk - and in fact guarantee - of failure.
Political progress - a fantasy that is also more important for progressive political movements than they would like to admit - cannot do without the epistemic postulate of a radical contingency that is projected into the future. Here it is important to recall the words of Zygmunt Bauman when he clairvoyantly points out in Socialism - The Active Utopia that those utopias that are projected into the future by people as active political subjects (e.g. the revolutionary subject whose actions are guided by the imagination of a future socialist/communist society) are able to question the absolutism - or that supposed epistemic objectivity - of current economic and political conditions (cf. Bauman 1976: 13). However, Bauman goes a decisive step further in his argumentation: the postulate of a better society to be realized in the future cannot do without recognizing the fact that "[...] each moment of human history is, to a greater or a lesser degree an open-ended situation" (ibid. 1976: 10). This is a point that much utopian thinking on the political progressive side often misses today, believing instead in the possibility of a closed and perfect future, not unlike the projection of love in a Hollywood romcom.
Alain Badiou (and also Slavoj Žižek) has made it clear that the phenomenon of love implies a similar form of contingency by pointing out that the contingency of love, which can also amount to a revolutionary event in people's lives, manifests itself in the fall that is inherent to the phenomenon of love. In this context, Badiou emphasizes with reference to an advertising poster with the inscription "Be in love without falling in love!":
I see it as the first threat to love, what I would call the safety threat. After all, it's not so very different to an arranged marriage. Not done in the name of family order and hierarchy by despotic parents, but in the name of safety for the individuals involved, through advance agreements that avoid randomness, chance encounters and in the end any existential poetry, due to the categorical absence of risks (Badiou 2012: 8).
For Badiou, the ideological project of dating agencies can be precisely located in the fact that they want to make love possible without the fall (as an unanticipated form of contingency). In this context, Žižek also makes the appropriate comparison with other phenomena in a society characterized by risk aversion: Such as the consumption of coffee without caffeine or beer without alcohol. According to both Badiou and Žižek, this fits perfectly into the consumerist logic of late capitalist social structures: if a product proves to be not suitable, it must be replaced by a new one - or: one gets rid of the potential risk even before buying the respective product. However, as Badiou correctly points out, this logic takes us back to feudal structures, which are also characterized by a form of risk aversion, in which the further course of life - together with the marriage partnerships that are to be organized - is predetermined. Alfie Bown points out that in the age of AI - where this form of risk aversion manifests itself in the selection of potential partners initiated by algorithms - new forms of avoiding that fall into love are taking place.
However, as Erich Fromm clairvoyantly analyzed in his thematization of the Fall from Paradise, it is precisely Adam and Eve's disobedience to the divine commandment to eat from the tree of knowledge that is the first step towards becoming human. To put it more precisely: without the banishment from paradise - that radical fall - we cannot think of ourselves as human beings and thus as active, i.e. political, subjects but would have to locate ourselves as individual parts of a metaphysically pre-determined telos - in this case: paradise or, on a social level, feudalism.
The subversive potential of love, as Žižek aptly notes, lies precisely in the inherent loss of control it brings into peoples lives. Everything else is subordinated to the determination brought by love in the moment of the fall - similar to the struggle for the realization of a political project or the never-ending search for a specific scientific knowledge (a circumstance that can have both positive and negative consequences).
The radically subversive potential of love - Srećko Horvat also draws attention to this aspect - can be located in the fact that this fall into love (whether it is love towards a political goal or a human subject) is capable of completely restructuring both the past and the future in the light of a new present (cf. Horvat 2016: 147-148). The risk becomes clear here once again: whether it is a revolution or a new love - every case always involves the risk of failure. Romantic comedies are also characterized by the imagination of love without the fall: what happens after the happy ending is usually not shown. Which is why plans have recently emerged to make sequels to some romantic comedies, such as Notting Hill, which thematize the divorce of the protagonists - an extremely bad idea, as Zoe Williams astutely pointed out in a recent article. A similar bad idea, as one might indeed argue, as the idea that there is no alternative (to neoliberalism or, in this case, divorce).
Florian Maiwald is a philosopher, political theorist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn.
