Looking back at my experiences with discussions on social media and in traditional media, I often find that – even when all arguments have been exchanged – nothing happens. Understanding definitely doesn’t happen and healing even less so. Because this way of conducting politics is the opposite of love politics; because it’s all about winning. Winning an argument. Winning a debate. But you can’t actually win politics. The same goes for wars: in a war we are all losers, sometimes for generations to come. [...] A popular phrase in politics – and elsewhere – is “without any alternative”. Nothing in the world is without an alternative. There certainly may be bad alternatives, but nothing is without an alternative. It is for this reason that I am convinced of the importance of love in political processes.
[…] Even apart from politics, love is a revolutionary act. And why is love a revolutionary act? Because the first thing you teach people you intend to colonize or oppress or discriminate against is that they are not among the loveable subjects, that they do not belong to the people worthy of being empathized with, that they cannot claim this empathy from society as a whole. It is no mere coincidence that this perception is shared by all discriminated groups and individuals: a sense of being worth less than others. More precisely: worth less love, worth less attention, worth less empathy. That is why something like: “You can’t love someone like me.” is not an individual statement and does not indicate an individual problem, but rather points to a political one. It can, nonetheless, become an individual problem, and this is the perfidious thing about it.
This is, above all, about the political dimension: because the fear of not being loved – or the impression of having to make an incredible effort to earn love – does something to us. When I say love, I also mean attention, respect, empathy and interest. Incidentally, this is also the trick behind love or rather the withdrawal of love as a political weapon: that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a real threat. Simply the fear of losing or never receiving love, or receiving less love, is enough to cripple people psychologically and even physically. This was described most impressively by the philosopher and writer James Baldwin in 1971, in his open letter to the philosopher and civil rights activist Angela Davis, who at the time was imprisoned for an armed robbery in which she was proven not to have been present: “The American triumph – in which the American tragedy has always been implicit – was to make Black people despise themselves. […] Black people were killing each other every Saturday night out on Lenox Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained to them, or to me, that it was intended that they should; that they were penned where they were, like animals, in order that they should consider themselves no better than animals.”1
I truly know of few authors who have put this challenge along with the pain and difficulty of loving oneself under these conditions into words better: “I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.”2
I love James Baldwin so much because James Baldwin loves so much. Because Baldwin’s relationship with the world – including the world of thought – is about love, about closeness, about entering into relationship, establishing a relationship that is not hierarchical. And because he never gives up on this connection, no matter how much the world may pressure him to do so. In 1962, he wrote a highly regarded essay in the New Yorker, Letter from a Region in My Mind. In this essay, he notes that hate is self-destructive and that we need love in order to transform ourselves and society. And he writes here: “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world .”3 What he means by this is that we don’t need to snuggle up together all the time or admire everything the other person does. Neither do we necessarily need to feel a profound sense of love at every moment. But we do have to build our relationship on the basis of love: which means that also our political negotiation processes have to be based on love. We must act like lovers. In response, philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote to him: “Your article in The New Yorker is a political event of a very high order, I think; it certainly is an event in my understanding of what is involved in the Negro question.”4
What is said here is indeed impressive, because racism was—politely put—the blind spot in Arendt’s work; in an article written only three years earlier, she had expressed her disapproval of the abolition of racial segregation in schools. Yet there was one point where she would not be swayed by Baldwin: “In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.”5 . This is based on Arendt’s conviction that love cannot be political as it denies plurality. Plurality is a central term in Hannah Arendt’s writings. For James Baldwin, plurality is the prerequisite for love in the first place. However, love does not equal sentimental escapism. Love is much more understood as a confrontation with the world: “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”6
This applies to so many things. [...] Being capable of perceiving others as different and still loving them. Not needing to make them be like us. The “other” is always greater than my own understanding of it. Our shared humanity is based on the fact that we are not in a position to effectively classify another person, to put a label on them. Nor, for that matter, ourselves. We are all many, we are contradictory, and that is what makes us human.
Sociologist George Yancey comments: “I want you to listen with love.”7 . The philosophical term for this is the “principle of charity” – the principle of benevolent interpretation. Listening to each other and seeing what the other person may, in the best case, have meant, and not jumping straight to conclusions or attributions, because they will reduce people – in their complex nature – to one identity. Yet it seems that this is how we as a society are talking to each other these days. I find that pretty scary. Love Politics is also about listening to ourselves with love, looking at ourselves with that same loving gaze. The writer and anarchist Gustav Landauer (https://gustav-landauer.org) once stated: “The state is a relationship, is a relationship between people, is a way in which people relate to each other; and you destroy it by entering into other relationships, by behaving differently towards each other.”8 . So love is one of the most effective ways to build communities and bind them together. James Baldwin speaks of love as a survival technique and a vehicle of resistance. For authoritarian systems know they must usurp love and prevent their subjects from loving themselves and each other, to instead redirect their love to an abstract love such as love for the king or a leader or a homeland.
People who truly love each other already embrace a utopian society in which they see their counterparts as equals. And here lies the heart of Love Politics: recognizing the humanness in my counterpart and perceiving the other as equal – and equally worthy of love. To place concern for the well-being of another person on the same level as concern for one’s own well-being. Not higher. Not lower. On the same level. [...] My great role model is the philosopher bell hooks. She defines love as the need for us to support one another in our – physical, mental and spiritual – growth, referring to “the process of love as the practice of freedom”.9 By the way, when I talk about political love, it somehow sounds like I’m demanding that we all become better people, that we should expand our individual hearts. We certainly can do that, too. But what I am talking about are structures. I call for structures that enable us to interact in a life-affirming way.
To allow for and achieve Love Politics, we need an appreciation of love on the societal level. We are living in late capitalism, in other words, the only social values that seem to matter are quantifiable values, for example, economic values or status values. As we all know, of course, these are not the only values. But we are unable to measure other values. So we need some kind of benchmark, a way of understanding these other values. We need a fair love economy where individuals no longer exploit the labour of love of others just because they are doing it voluntarily – out of love, so to speak. And we need education regarding love and social love strategies, such as de-escalation, communication strategies, empathy, radical happiness, non-violent communication, consensus building, etcetera. Yet, what we also need is a community of memory. If plurality is to be taken for granted in our society today, then there must, at the same time, be a pluralistic view of the past, as publicist Kübra Gümüşay has pointed out.10 […] This implies that all parts of a society must be included in the culture of remembrance and not – as it presently appears – only particular people. Hence all these debates about statues, memorial days and street names. We shouldn’t be having these debates against each other, but with each other. Whom do we want to commemorate? Who are we? Another very important point is civic trust. We certainly may not have a Politics of Love, but when I look at the news, it seems we are living in a culture of hate.
How much more innovative would it be to instead engage in debates, talk shows and public discussions in which participants try to understand and learn from each other – ensuring that we as a society learn these communication skills. And here’s another thing we need: civic grace – and thus the willingness to actually let go of political resentment in order to be able to work together towards common goals – versus political resentment which is a serious threat to democracy. Kübra Gümüşay put it so wonderfully: “What we are missing is an error culture.”11
We too readily put people in the pillory of identification. Of course, we can and are actually obliged to discuss or criticize individual statements. But we have no culture of learning from our mistakes. Or of simply disagreeing with each other. In this sense, we may have debates, but we lack a culture of debate. And this is something we could be really proud of. Sociologist Armin Nassehi notes that a sense of unease is a characteristic feature of democracies, because one is able to say no.12 . In a dictatorship you can’t say no, whereas in a democracy you can, and we should be delighted to disagree. We live in a culture that places more importance on punishment than on change. Research shows that the dynamics which lead to outrage, such as scandalizing or calling out, are not the same as those which create change. Scandalizing is very helpful when it comes to generating attention, but for change we need the whole range of nuances and negotiating with each other along with an understanding of why someone has done things differently.
[...] Originally, I considered empathy to be the fourth pillar of my Politics of Love. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between empathy and compassion. We are so reluctant to use compassion because it sounds so Christian, but that is not what I mean. Empathy refers to having empathy with people we see as similar, and the more similar, the more empathy, but also: the stranger, the less empathy. At the moment, we have a lot of empathy with the people who have to flee from Ukraine. Excellent, keep it up! At the same time, there is shockingly little empathy for people who have to flee to us from other countries. Compassion, by contrast, is not limited to members of our own group. Yes, for compassion I don’t even have to agree with the members of this group. Compassion is unconditional. And, not least, we need to talk about this: that compassion is part of our human dignity.
In the 1960s, love was seen as the path to revolution – “Make love, not war” – whereas now love is seen as the opposite of this, a form of capitalism par excellence, a commodification of desire. It is for this reason that the left and cultural workers are very cautious when it comes to love, including the word love. One could almost speak of a fear of contact. This results in the absence of a concept of self-love and self-care that does not immediately devolve into consumerism. But above all, it makes it impossible to think in utopian terms. Because for utopias we need love! [...] I truly believe that in order to be able to conceive utopias, we need love. Because I deeply believe that love is the act of perceiving the world around us – and in the cases I have just talked about, the people around us – as animate. That love is the act of entering into a renewed relationship with the world and transforming the world.
Dr. Mithu Sanyal is a cultural theorist, author, journalist and critic living in Düsseldorf. Her non-fiction book Vulva. Das unsichtbare Geschlecht, 2016 Vergewaltigung. Aspekte eines Verbrechens was published in 2009. Her debut novel Identitti was published in 2021, followed by Antichristie in 2024.
The text is based on excerpts from a lecture Mithu Sanyal held in Dresden on 13 March, 2022: Politics of Love – Wie politisch ist Liebe?, Dresdner Reden 2022.
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1
Cf. James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis,” The New York Review, 7 Jan. 1971:
nybooks.com/articles/1971/01/07/an-open-letter-to-my-sister-miss-angela-davis - 2 Cf. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, Boston: Beacon Press, 1990, p. 98
- 3 James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” first published in The New Yorker, printed edition, 17 Nov. 1962: newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind
- 4 Cf. Hannah Arendt, “The Meaning of Love in Politics. A Letter by Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin,” 21 Nov., 1962, HannahArendt.net. Zeitschrift für politisches Denken / Journal for Political Thinking: hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/95/156
- 5 Cf. Hannah Arendt, "The Meaning of Love in Politics. A Letter by Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin", 21 Nov. 1962, HannahArendt.net. Zeitschrift für politisches Denken / Journal for Political Thinking: hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/95/156
- 6 James Baldwin, “Everybodyʼs Protest Novel,” Notes of a Native Son, Boston: Beacon Press, 1955, p. 14
- 7 George Yancey, “Dear White America,” in: The New York Times / The Stone, 24 Dec. 2015: cathedralofhope.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Dear-White-America_The-New-York-Times.pdf
- 8 Cf. Gustav Landauer, “Schwache Staatsmänner, schwächeres Volk! (1910),” Der Sozialist, 15 Jun. 1910, quote trans. by B. Lang: https://www.panarchy.org/landauer/staat.html
- 9 Cf. bell hooks, “Love as the Practice of Freedom (1994),” Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, New York/London: Routledge, 2006, p. 248: collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/hooks_Love_As_The_Practice_Of_Freedom.pdf
- 10 Cf. Kübra Gümüsay, excerpts from the lecture, “Vom Ihr zum Wir – Zugehörigkeit statt Ausgrenzung, Vortrag,” held at the 17th Berlin Symposium on Sharing Responsibility in Refugee Protection, 19–20 June 2017, Evangelische Akademie zu Berlin: eaberlin.de/aktuelles/2017/vortrag-guemuesay-symposium/vortrag-guemuesay-symposium.pdf
- 11 Cf. Kübra Gümüşay, “Jedes Wort hat Wirkung,” a discussion at Deutschlandfunk Kultur, moderated by Susanne Führer on 26 June 2020
- 12 Armin Nassehi, Unbehagen. Theorie der überforderten Gesellschaft, Munich: C. H. Beck, 2021: fes.de/akademie-fuer-soziale-demokratie/buch-essenz/armin-nassehi-2021-unbehagen-theorie-der-ueberforderten-gesellschaft