The Radicality of Love

Srećko Horvat

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745691152, 9780745691145
• eBook ISBN: 9780745691176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What would happen if we could stroll through the revolutionary history of the 20th century and, without any fear of the possible responses, ask the main protagonists - from Lenin to Che Guevara, from Alexandra Kollontai to Ulrike Meinhof - seemingly naïve questions about love?

Although all important political and social changes of the 20th century included heated debates on the role of love, it seems that in the 21st century of new technologies of the self (Grindr, Tinder, online dating, etc.) we are faced with a hyperinflation of sex, not love. By going back to the sexual revolution of the October Revolution and its subsequent repression, to Che?s dilemma between love and revolutionary commitment and to the period of ?68 (from communes to terrorism) and its commodification in late capitalism, the Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat gives a possible answer to the question of why it is that the most radical revolutionaries like Lenin or Che were scared of the radicality of love. What is so radical about a seemingly conservative notion of love and why is it anything but conservative?

This short book is a modest contribution to the current upheavals around the world - from Tahrir to Taksim, from Occupy Wall Street to Hong Kong, from Athens to Sarajevo - in which the question of love is curiously, surprisingly, absent.

1
Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies

“Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.” When Arthur Rimbaud uttered these prophetic words in his Une Saison en Enfer (1873), he was criticizing the longing for security and classical relationships.

He himself was dreaming about crusades, unrecorded voyages of discovery, moral revolutions, and enchantment. And he even reached it in his short and wild affair – accompanied by lots of heavy drinking, absinthe and hashish – with Verlaine. As we know, the older poet abandoned his wife and infant son. In the end he fired two shots at Rimbaud.

Although today we can only speculate whether disappointment in love was the reason for Rimbaud’s radical escape from poetry to Africa, one thing is certain: after the urge to reinvent love, Rimbaud ended up reinventing himself. First he joined the Dutch Colonial Army in Java and soon deserted; then he went to Cyprus to work as a construction worker; in the end, he spent the rest of his life in Yemen and Ethiopia as an explorer, photographer, and even an arms dealer.

As we can see from his letters from Africa (now collected in the book I promise to be good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud), in none of them does he ever make even the slightest reference to (his or any other) poetry. It is as if, for himself, Rimbaud as a poet never existed.

In today’s era of hyperconnectivity and mass surveillance (which is, in the end, the same), Rimbaud’s big escape would probably have been an impossible task. Either paparazzi would be bombarding us with photos of a naked Rimbaud on a beach in Aden in our daily newspapers, or Twitter and Facebook profiles would be full of statuses about Rimbaud. Today it’s impossible to hide.

To recover from the usual hypersocialization effect provoked by another conference, instead of Rimbaud’s big escape, last summer I naively tried to hide on a remote Croatian island, in a lovely old fisherman’s town called Komiža.

I arrived at a beach that wasn’t especially crowded with people because it was the end of the season. Expecting fewer people there, I headed further down to the nudist beach behind the hills. Unfortunately, the number of people was still too many, so I climbed over unfriendly rocks to reach an even more distant and empty beach.

There it was. No one around. Only me, sitting in the sun and watching the waves lap the shore.

After an hour or so, a small dot appeared on the horizon. When it came closer, I realized it was a man in a kayak. When the kayak landed on the beach, and the man came out of it, I realized he was naked.

Since there was only the two of us, it was normal to start a conversation.

“It is really hot today,” he said, looking at the sun.

Then he turned around, standing like Priapus with his large penis in front of my face and asked: “Do you want to cool down?”

“I just had a swim.”

“But if you go further, there is a nice cave, haven’t you seen it?”

I still didn’t see where he was going, so I replied with naive sincerity: “No, I didn’t see it yet, and I just wanted to start reading a book.”

He became more direct: “Do you want to play?”

Finally, realizing where the whole conversation had been going right from the start; it was just that I didn’t get it, I became more direct: “I have a girlfriend.”

“I have a girlfriend, too,” he responded like a cannon in the middle of the empty beach.

“And you are still playing around?”

“Yes, why not?”

“I do not, and I’m not gay.”

“Neither am I, so let’s have fun!”

“No!” and a potential summer romance ended here.

Obviously, these days it’s impossible to find an empty beach even on the most remote island. Even a while after our pleasant conversation, we were still both sitting on the beach, each in his own small corner of the previously empty beach.

Then, after a short while, another, very small dot appeared on the horizon.

It was a snorkel.

As it came closer, the snorkel transformed into another naked man who soon landed on the beach as well.

Immediately, as if they had an appointment, he lay down beside the other guy, and a few minutes later my untried romance headed in the direction of the alleged cave. Yet another few minutes later, the new guy on the beach put his snorkel back on and swam in the same direction. Who knows, maybe he was not interested in having fun with another guy: he actually wanted to talk about his ideas on revolution, and I was the one who took it only as a call for sex.

In the age of “cold intimacies” – a term coined by Eva Illouz to describe the new emotional culture of late capitalism¹ – the encounter is often pre-programmed. In the age of “fuck buddies” people often just become fuck bodies. What we encounter today is this sort of liberal permissiveness (“Anything goes!”) which is a sad caricature of serious discussions on “free love” between Alexandra Kollontai and V. I. Lenin, or Kommune 1 and Rudi Dutschke. Already during the October Revolution, Lenin had warned that the demand for freedom of love can be understood as a bourgeois concept, and when the generation of ’68 was practicing “free love” at Communes in Berlin, Rudi Dutschke echoed Lenin’s words by saying that “the exchange of women and men is nothing else but the application of the bourgeois exchange principle under pseudo-revolutionary auspices.”²

Isn’t the best illustration to be found in Gilbert Adair’s novel The Holy Innocents (1988) – later put on screen by Bertolucci in his The Dreamers – about an erotic triangle set against the background of the ’68 Paris student riots? Instead of joining the revolution, what the trio – the incestuous siblings joined by a stranger – does during the whole movie is in a way what was happening in the German Kommune 1. Only at the very end of the novel, when the young American student walks away from the ’68 chaos, do we see the other two protagonists throwing a Molotov cocktail at the police. Who has won today? It is not these two enfants terribles, who were prepared to turn their own sexual lives upside down and at the same time join the riots in the streets, but this young American student who in Adair’s novel argued that the riots have no meaning.

The revolutionary aim at changing everyday life was perverted into the postmodern variety of lifestyles: it is not subversive anymore, at least in the Western world, neither to be gay or a transvestite, nor to have regular sex with two people at the same time or ten. And we have even taken one step further where neither does the content as such have any meaning anymore. It is enough to visit Camden in London or Tarrytown in New York to see where this ideology of lifestyle has brought us: the hipster subculture is the perfect embodiment of this co-optation: it is the pure (hedonistic) aestheticization of everyday life without any subversive potential whatsoever. The “young creatives,” although a biography of Che Guevara might be sticking out of their bags, don’t even pretend to be doing a revolution of everyday life anymore.

The disastrous consequences of the hyperinflation of this sort of false “reinvention of love” can also be seen in two movies from 2013 which each in its own way tackles the fate of postmodern love affairs. On the one side we have Spike Jonze’s Her, on the other we have Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac.

If there is one disturbing moment of this failed “reinvention of love,” it is to be found in the moment when the main character in Her, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), finally tries to compensate for the lack of his computer lover’s missing body. When Theodore invites home a real woman in order to have sex with her, a complete stranger arrives accompanied by the voice of Scarlett Johansson (the operating system Theodore is in love with). But instead of successful sex, the abyss between voice and body becomes even more tangible. The effect is not a reunification of body and voice, but complete alienation. It is a real “season in hell.”

It ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreplay: To Fall in Love, or Revolution
• 1. Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies
• 2. Desire in Tehran: What Are the Iranians Dreaming Of?
• 3. Libidinal Economy of the October Revolution
• 4. The Temptation of Che Guevara: Love or Revolution?
• 5. “What Do I Care about Vietnam, if I Have Orgasm Problems?”
• Afterplay: The Radicality of Love
• End User License Agreement