The Radicalism of Romantic Love

Critical Perspectives

Renata Grossi, David West

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138364455
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317018308
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Undoubtedly Romantic love has come to saturate our culture and is often considered to be a, or even the, major existential goal of our lives, capable of providing us with both our sense of worth and way of being in the world. The Radicalism of Romantic Love interrogates the purported radicalism of Romantic love from philosophical, cultural and psychoanalytic perspectives, exploring whether it is a subversive force capable of breaking down entrenched social, political and cultural norms and structures, or whether, in spite of its role in the fight against certain barriers, it is in fact a highly conservative impulse. Exploring both the grounds for the central place of Romantic love in contemporary lives and the meaning, extent and nature of its supposed radicalism, this volume considers love from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with attention to matters of gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity. With authors examining a range of questions, including the role of love in the same-sex marriage debate, polyamory and the notion of love as a political force, The Radicalism of Romantic Love illuminates a fundamental but perplexing aspect of our contemporary lives and will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in the emotions and love as a social and political phenomenon.

1
LOVE AS A POLITICAL FORCE

Romantic love, love-politics and solidarity

Ann Ferguson

Introduction

Romantic love has been eulogised as a radical force for gender equality, especially as it has developed in the twentieth century in Western societies. Anthony Giddens goes so far as to argue that we have a new egalitarian paradigm for equality in couple love, which he calls ‘confluent love’ (Giddens 1992). Twentieth-century feminists have been much more wary. Starting with Beauvoir in the 1950s and continuing through Firestone and Atkinson in the 1960s and 1970s, they have seen heterosexual couple love as the base for solidifying patriarchy. More recently, the materialist feminist strand of thought – including Anna Jónasdóttir in Sweden (1994, 2011), my own work (Ferguson 1989, 1991, 2012, 2014, 2016), that of Rosemary Hennessy (2000, 2014) as well as the critical theory of sociologist Eva Illouz (2007, 2012) – has argued that contemporary romantic love, although it can promote gender inequalities, is also a positive force that should not be rejected tout court by feminists. In this chapter I shall argue that the focus on individual romantic love as a radical force is misplaced. In hierarchical societies like our own, personal relations can only be emancipatory when they are supported by radical social movements that challenge existing systems of domination – capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, anthropocentrism – with relations that promote collective solidarity, love and practices of freedom (cf. hooks 2000a, May 2017, Weir 2017).

I started thinking about how to understand male domination in the 1970s and 1980s by developing a ‘dual systems’ socialist-feminist theory of patriarchy and capitalism, taking insights from the Marxist-Feminist work of Juliet Mitchell and Nancy Hartsock, socialist-feminist Heidi Hartmann, and Freudian feminists Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin. I came to believe, with Benjamin, that there is a psychological dialectic of autonomy versus recognition in heterosexual couple love relations, which contributes to the oppression of women in contemporary capitalist, patriarchal societies. But I have since come to disagree with the ontological interpretations of Freud on which Benjamin’s analysis is based, as well as the historical and social implications of her theories. A very important lacuna is the lack of attention Freudian feminists place on the class, racial, ethnic and sexual dynamics of the affective economy of love and other affects as they both reinforce and undermine patriarchy. Thus the dual systems approach needs to be replaced by a multi-systems intersectional analysis of systems of social domination.¹

I shall elaborate both my social and historical approach, which ties differences in the operation of the gendered autonomy-recognition dialectic analysed by Benjamin (1988) to love practices, and what Teresa Brennan (2004) calls the ‘transmission of affect’. She and I both examine the ‘affective economy’ of late capitalist, white-supremacist patriarchal societies. Rather than the gendered personalities Benjamin, and Chodorow (1978) target, it is the historically constituted class, racist-ethnicist and gendered divisions of labour and of material and affective resources in such societies which mandate different kinds of autonomy, love, and recognition practices for differently situated women, men, and trans-gendered people. In advanced consumer capitalism, the emphasis on love as the central meaning of women’s lives creates a particular problem of status for women (Illouz 2012). Yet contradictions in white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy have also fuelled resistance movements based on groups practicing solidarity love.

The affective economy: love energy exchanges as material force

My own theory of ‘the affective economy’ uses this notion as an analytic concept, much like Marx’s concept of the ‘mode of production’. The affective economy takes specific historical forms that shape people’s affective relations to each other. I will elucidate this concept using insights from my own work (Ferguson 1989, 1991, 2012, 2014, 2016), that of Anna Jónasdóttir (1994, 2011), Lena Gunnarsson (2014), Teresa Brennan (1993, 2000, 2004), bell hooks (1982, 2000a, 2000b), Audre Lorde (1984), the Combahee River Collective (1983), Anna Julia Cooper (1988 [1892]) and Allison Weir (2017). All of us in various ways strive to elaborate the grounds for a feminist love-politics that is not only personal but political, one which grounds itself in the embodied forces of love in order to challenge ongoing systems of social domination.

My earlier work (Ferguson 1989, 1991) posits that humans require in our lives the exchange of a life–love energy that I called ‘sex-affective energy’ in order to distinguish it from Freud’s notion of Libido. Freud sometimes identified this with a sexual/erotic drive (Eros) and at other times treated it more broadly as a life-drive to unite with and reproduce others in contrast to the death drive (Thanatos), the desire to return to a state of non-being. Like Teresa Brennan (2000) and Deleuze and Guattari (1977), I reject the idea that this sex-affective energy is in Freud’s sense a ‘drive’ that has its consummate aim in bodily orgasm or pleasure. Rather, I see this energy as an affective impulse to connect with other living beings in a connection immediately felt by humans to generate value. Affective or love energy is a bodily force that meets a material need to be valued and cared for as a part of an interconnected relation with (an)other(s). In all societies humans are involved in an ongoing circulation of affective energy that involves the ‘being-production’ of ourselves in relation to others (Bending 2002). This takes place in common human interactive activities including sports, arts, play, erotic interactions and care for each other. In these value-creating interactions, the quality of the affection we give and are given either relatively empowers or disempowers us and augments or diminishes our value in social exchanges with others.

But how does this empowerment or disempowerment work? Is there a historical way to understand how domination systems such as patriarchy, racism, capitalism and heteronormativity work in different types of affective economy? In what follows, I will outline Teresa Brennan’s answer to this question by explaining her idea of the ‘energetic economy’ of living things and the connection of this ontology to her Marxist-inspired critique of the negative effects of capitalism. I will also sketch her view of the associated creation of a certain sort of contained Western ego-structure based on what she calls ‘the foundational fantasy’. She sees the foundational fantasy of a self-contained ego as the psychic base for the perpetuation of male dominance in late capitalism as well as a reinforcement for capitalist consumerism and the ongoing depletion of environmental resources for the reproduction of life.

Brennan argues that ‘all beings, all entities in and of the natural world, all forces, whether naturally or artificially forged, are connected energetically’ and she calls this an ‘interactive energetic economy’ (Brennan 2000, p. 41). She acknowledges her debt to Spinoza by pointing out his similar view that ‘there is a conative, energetic force coursing through and activating individual subjects and their living environment’ (Brennan 2000, p. 41). But she claims that since the advent of modernity in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Europe, a dysfunctional notion of individuals as self-enclosed egos – what she, following Lacan’s analysis of the ego (Lacan 1953, 1966: cf. Brennan 1993), calls ‘the foundational fantasy’ – has distorted our understanding of this cosmic energetic connection. Brennan refers to Walter Benjamin (1979) who argues that, since the advent of modernity and the development of the notion of the contained, enclosed individual we have lost an earlier ecstatic understanding of this energetic connection between all things. With the development of capitalism and the growth of the lust for profit, humans have come to see nature as an object to be mastered. The growth of technology as a means to this end has developed along with the view that we humans are wilful, separate subjects who can use nature and each other for our own self-interested benefit. Even though Brennan believes that there is a timeless ontological base for what she calls ‘the foundational fantasy’, which guides the development of human consciousness, she suggests that the notion of psychical containment – as opposed to psychical energetic connection – may be historically and culturally specific to the modern West.

Brennan notes Michèle le Doeuff’s claim that the late Renaissance introduces a

philosophical revolution which gives to the ‘I’ a discretionary omnipotence over the concrete self. In the Avicennan tradition, by contrast, my imagination is not really my imagination, because it is moved and affected by images which I receive, by the other’s charm, by his or her wishes, beliefs, and fears.

(le Doeuff 1986, p. 86; quoted in Brennan 2000, p. 42)

With this and other evidence, including Hobbes, Shakespeare and the interpretation of Descartes, she argues that the concept of introspection and the interior consciousness increasingly takes hold of Christian devotional practices that assume the idea of an inner life (le Doeuff 1986, p. 86; quoted in Brennan 2000, p. 46). As I shall argue below, this not only explains the possibility of modern romantic love but also can shed light on the contemporary alienation of most heterosexual couple love (cf. Ferguson 2016) and on how love practices within such couples tend to perpetuate male domination. In contrast to Benjamin’s feminist Freudian interpretation, Brennan thus appropriates Freud’s theories of ego development in a way that explains the psychological basis for patriarchy while informing a historicised view of ‘the ego’s era’ as applying to our specific historical period.

According to Brennan’s (2000) interpretation of Freud, influenced by Melanie Klein, the infant who at first hallucinates being one with the mother subsequently develops a separate sense of self when frustrated because his or her needs (inevitably) are not constantly met. He or she is angry at and envious of the mother, desires to poison or kill her and, by a psychological process of reversal, projects his or her own self into the role of the powerful mother, making him- or herself the active subject and her the passive object of his or her will. For Klein, as for Brennan, this is a universal tendency in the development of the human ego, because the psychological creation of the subject as a separate psychical entity is based on demoting another subject to the status of mere object to be controlled. But Brennan gives her own distinctive reading of the foundational fantasy which differs ontologically from Freud and Klein. As she elaborates in her 2004 book The Transmission of Affect:

[m]y theory is an alternative to psychoanalytic theory or metapsychology in that it postulates an origin for affects that is independent of the individual experiencing them. These affects come from the other, but we deny them. Or they come from us, but we pretend (habitually) that they come from the other.

She goes on to argue that

[T]he moment of the foundational fantasy is the moment when one says either ‘I am good and powerful. The other is base and abject’ or ‘I am miserable and abject. The other is good and powerful (so good that sometimes they will punish me for my abjection).

(Brennan 2004, p. 13)

There are actual affects (positive or negative energies), which are transmitted from one individual to another as effects of this foundational fantasy, which in turn allow us to ignore the fact that they are transmitted (either by me to the other if I am angry or envious, or from the other to me if I am depressed, anxious, or self-abasing).

Since the foundational fantasy tends to blame the mother for all negative affect, it is not surprising that it should be present in patriarchal societies, including modern Western society, where those thought of as women or feminine beings are designated to be the ones who carry negative affects for the other (Brennan 2004, p. 15). On Lacan and Brennan’s reading, this objectification of the mother and other things outside oneself into passive objects, which are seen as means to serve one’s needs and blamed or attacked if those needs are not met, is a tendency which can either be diminished or vastly expanded, depending on the historical culture and material economies in which human children are raised. Lacan ironically terms our period of contemporary Western capitalist society ‘the ego’s era’. He ridicules the paranoid fantasies and omnipotent aspirations of what he analyses as the mere fiction of the ‘I’ as a subject, which ignores the role of the unconscious and the material surroundings of human emotions and actions (Lacan 1966). For Lacan, the ego’s era results from the historical growth of a destructive objectification of the other and of objectifying knowledge (positivism). This latter is itself psychically and economically based on a need for the control of objects (including other people) in the massively competitive, destructive world system that capitalism and its technology have created (cf. Lacan 1953, Brennan 2000).

The affective economy, the material economy and love

For Brennan the affective and the material energetic systems flow into, and influence, each other. In the contemporary capitalist system where more and more commodities are produced and the desire for instant gratification is increased by individualist and capitalist ideology and advertising, people are taught to desire to have their every whim met instantly with a commodity or a service. Yet this occurs in a world in which there are greater and greater inequalities of wealth and income, greater exhaustion of natural resources and ecological damage in the process of commodity production. Thus more and more people are at risk of losing jobs, of losing control of their lives and failing to be able to meet their consumer desires. In terms of her economic analysis of the capitalist economy, Brennan revises Marx’s labour theory of value to reassess how the capitalist system harnesses, produces and depletes natural energies, including those of living human labourers and consumers as well as non-living natural resources (Brennan 2000).

Psychically, in the affective economy this increases envy, aggressive tendencies toward others, and anxiety, which is either projected outward as negative affect in racism, sexism and chauvinism² (most recently, for example, in Islamophobia against Muslims) or turned inward in blaming the self, hence depression and increased suicides (cf. Ehrenreich 2015). As I shall argue below, this also explains how many heterosexual romantic love relations continue to promote male domination within the couple, in spite of the professed gender equality involved in the contemporary ideal of mutual romantic love (cf. Ferguson 2016, hooks 2000a, Digby 2014). If we compare bell hooks’s work on love in our contemporary Western capitalist societies to that of Brennan, we find some important overlaps. Both of them see consumerist culture as undermining practices of love. Speaking specifically of the United States, hooks argues that our present culture of consumerism is based on narcissism. As she says:

The culture of narcissism is not a place where love can flourish. The emergence of the ‘me’ culture is a direct response to our nation’s failure to truly actualise the vision of democracy articulated in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Left alone in the ‘me’ culture, we consume and consume with no thought of others. Greed and exploitation become the norm when an ethic of domination prevails. They bring in their wake alienation and lovelessness. In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.

(hooks 2000a, pp. 105–106)

While hooks emphasises spiritual and ethical concerns about the ‘me’ culture and its attendant lack of support for love, Brennan is more interested in the ontological effects of an overly contained ego and the transmission of negative rather than positive affective energy to those in relations of subordination (women and other abjected peoples).

However, both Brennan and hooks give a similar analysis of love as a potentially transformative force, when and if it is practiced correctly with the right motivation. hooks says:

The need for instant gratification is a component of greed. This same politics of greed is at play when folks seek love. They often want fulfilment immediately. Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know genuine love we have to invest time and commitment.

(hooks 2000a, p. 114)

So far hooks’s distinction between genuine and instant gratification love is like Zygmunt Bauman’s distinction between romantic love and ‘liquid love’, which will be discussed below. But unlike Bauman (2003), who sees this as a ge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Love as a political force: Romantic love, love-politics and solidarity
• 2 Beyond the romantic constellation of sex, marriage and love
• 3 The rise and fall of the romantic ideal
• 4 Freud on romantic love: Strange, disappointing, and satisfying
• 5 Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and radical romantic love
• 6 Depressive love: A social pathology
• 7 Libertine reveries: Romantic love in the time of radical terror
• 8 What kind of love is Nietzsche’s Amor fati?
• 9 Falling for the collective: When love embraces the political
• 10 Romantic love as a political strategy in the same-sex marriage debate
• Index