A note to a political understanding of love in our global age

Abstract

"Towards the end of their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire,1 Toni Negri and Michael Hardt talk of democracy in the Spinozist terms of constituent power and as the “deployment of force that defends the historical progress of emancipation and liberation.”2 Intriguingly, they add that this power is ‘an act of love’, that we need to ‘recover the material and political sense of love’, and conclude “when love is conceived politically, then, th[e] creation of a new humanity is the ultimate act of love.”3 Th at two of the most forceful contemporary radical political theorists should turn in their most recent work to theorizing the political act of love after promoting, following Deleuze, the nomadic, de-territorializing nature of desire is, I believe, a sign of this historical change underway. Both Hardt and Negri would strongly disagree with the way I take up this change in the following. Th at said, to move from desire to love in the political domain testifi es itself, whether it be in an indirect way or not, to a need to refl ect again upon how we assume the challenges of the twenty-fi rst century, theoretically and practically.