All this misanthropy makes In Praise of Love especially disarming. In it, Badiou – a political radical who’s been called ‘a metaphysician in the grand style’ – devotes considerable energy to explaining why ‘we must re-invent love [and] defend it, because it faces threats from all sides’.
Unlike pop philosophy types like Alain de Botton, Badiou’s work is not known for being accessible. This makes the very slight size of this book – at 104 tiny pages it’s hardly more than a pamphlet – something of a relief. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t contain a few gems. Badiou’s sometimes obtuse musings yield lucid and moving observations.
He touches on love in many contexts, from politics and performance to its role in communism and celebrity culture. He also devotes time to talking about the obvious: sex. There are no hymns to the soixante-neuf from this ageing soixante-huitard, however: Badiou’s view is that sex is better at marking out the spaces between individuals than uniting them: ‘In love, the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other.’
Perhaps the most powerful of Badiou’s ideas in defining love is what he calls the ‘Two Scene’, when the world is viewed ‘from the point of view of two and not one’. It’s a deceptively simple concept which he uses to attack various myths about love. At one end of the spectrum these myths come from an over-regulated, contractual view of relationships; he particularly hates the ‘safety-first’ approach of dating websites which claim that through them you can have ‘risk free’ love affairs. At the other extreme is what Badiou calls the ‘meltdown concept’ of love, the Romeo and Juliet-style passion of high Romanticism in which is really just an encounter. One in which ‘love is simultaneously ignited, consummated and consumed’, and which ideally ends in both parties carking it.
Badiou is a lot more interested in the long-view: love as an ongoing process which ‘can’t be restricted to the meeting, but takes shape over time’. Amongst some very abstract statements, a picture of his view of love gradually emerges which is actually highly practical. As he said in a recent interview, ‘Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it’s not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!’ There’s something about this rather realistic approach that is very heartening, even romantic.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
In Praise of Love
By Alain Badiou
Hardcover, 104pp, RRP $22.99
ISBN: 9781846687792
Allen & Unwin / Serpents Tail
