A PROPERLY POLITICAL CONCEPT OF LOVE: Three Approaches in Ten Pages

ONE: LIP (INTRODUCTION TO AMBIVALENCE) There’s a part of me that wants to give a little lip and simply reject that we have never had a properly political concept of love. It’s been floated by so many as a solution—literally, a loosening or an unfastening, a dissolution—to the problem of social antagonism, or fractured community. I take the genre of Michael’s essay to be propositional, though, as it references only a sliver of what our conversations suggest he actually thinks might be done with love. But I will focus on what’s here, because to love is to deal with what’s here amid the noise of projected out pasts, futures, and states. But “dealing with” might point too much toward exchange and bargaining, the forging of false equivalences. Maybe I should say what I always say, which is that I propose love to involve a rhythm of an ambition and an intention to stay in sync, which is a lower bar than staying attuned, but still hard and awkward enough. The anxiety to define—a key feature of being in proximity to all magnetic ideas—especially cleaves to love, and so the conversion of a love into a properly political concept must induce attention to what to do with the freight the term ports with it: in this case, quite a huge dust ball. Michael proposes to release the sensorium from capital, which means from the habits of attention and mediation that translate objects immediately into property, equate possessive individualism with sovereign freedom, and conflate narcissism with recognition, ethics, and justice. He begins with a question of equivalence: if not the money form as the engine of social exchange, then what? What mode of