MH

BGG

Your essay The Procedures of Love1 that was published in conjunction with dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 goes back to your earlier thoughts on “politics of love”. What led you to engage with love as a political concept?

In my writings with Toni Negri, definitely already in Empire, we're trying to experiment with what love can mean for politics. Why this comes about is perhaps best answered with some longer citations within the revolutionary tradition. A quite well-known quote from Che Guevara in his essay about socialism and the “new man” could serve for this, where he says that the true revolutionary will be moved by feelings of love. So, on one hand, there's a notion of love within the communist tradition that is about solidarity and struggle. For a true revolutionary like Che this involves a feeling of love, not for the people in some generic sense, but for those with whom one struggles. It's a bond. Maybe more interesting for us could be passages in Karl Marx's work when he was young and trying to figure out a notion of communism that's based on the affects.

In these early 1844 Paris manuscripts, he says that communism will be a transformation of the senses. By the senses, he means all of our organs of interactions with each other and the world. For these he gives a long list, including what we normally think of the five senses, but also broader concepts. He lists hearing, thinking, feeling, loving. These are all things that have been currently defined and that we operate with according to a capitalist logic and the relations of private property. So he tries to think what it would mean to reinvent the senses, including loving, not on a property basis, but on the basis of what I would call the common—and this would be communism.

This is often considered by those reading Marx as Marx's romantic phase or something like that. But I think it's really nothing of the sort. It's very practical, a bit mysterious though. Marx says in the same text that private property has made us so stupid that we can only consider something ours when we own it. It's an interesting phrase. What would it mean to consider something ours outside of questions of ownership? That is already speaking directly to love, trying to think both at the interpersonal and intimate level, and at the social and political levels, what would it mean to consider something ours without owning it? And what would it mean to reinvent our organs of relationships to each other in the world without the logic of property as its basis?

But how can something be both intimate, or private, and public? How can you both own and not own something? This strikes me as a paradox.

Let me sort out two separate paradoxes in this. One is, I do think that it's often helpful and useful to think of love and the nature and characteristics of love in the intimate sphere and in the public or social sphere separately. But I do agree when you say that the two discussions are in some sense parallel. So one should divorce the two. But the qualities, I would say, of a productive, positive, perhaps even revolutionary conception of love does have similar characteristics in those two realms. The second seeming paradox is not so much a paradox, but a conceptual difficulty. That’s why I like that sentence that I quoted from Marx so much when he says private property has made us so stupid that we can only conceive of our bonds in terms of property. That doesn't mean that we can't conceive of bonds outside of that, or that one shouldn't be able to. It's just that we have a kind of blinders on from capitalist ideology. And here's another application. Directly thinking with Marx is Alexandra Kollontai, the early Soviet revolutionary, and also a politician within the early Soviet years.

Kollontai takes seriously this notion that we need to reinvent love and to challenge the bourgeois forms of love that are based on private property. She talks about the couple form in this way. I think it is equally true today that the couple form is usually or often conceived as a property relation. You are mine and I am yours. Their actual property relations reinforce the ownership of property. So I think it's not hard to recognize that what you call the property nature of these intimate bonds are transactional. But you're absolutely right, one could also question the transactional nature of such bonds. So Kollontai then says, we need to reinvent love outside of property relations, and tries to figure out what this new love would be. I think that's an interesting and enormous challenge. Here we're talking in the intimate and private spheres that I would say have analogies in the political sphere. But so far, rather than a paradox, I see this as a challenge to our current intellectual capacities. Like Marx says, we're stupid and that's essentially what Kollontai is saying, too, that we need to think differently and act differently. In what Marx is calling our senses, our organs of interaction with each other in the world, we need to reinvent them.

One problem I see here is that you can't really extract the private from the public sphere, which works also in the sense that the constructions of love with which we are operating in our capitalist societies have historically evolved in a certain way and are inextricably interconnected with the social fabric of these societies. So how is it possible to reinvent something that is so strongly interwoven with this social texture?

Exactly. It's a big challenge. That doesn't mean to say we're not bound by all the traditions that we come out of. They are a heavy weight. You might even say it's a nightmare weighing on the brain of the living. But I also wouldn't exaggerate the uniformity of that tradition. There are many counter examples of thinking love differently within the history of European thought, for one thing. We could find these elsewhere, too.

In the face of love being so closely intertwined with the realm of intimacy, it’s intriguing that you develop an idea of love as something that might have impact on society and could thus be an agent of change in a collective sense. But what actually is this thing called love?

What is it? Let me try in two ways. I agree with you that love can be difficult to define or has many forms, but basically, conceptually, love is a powerful bond, a bond stronger than death. So in the intimate sphere, in the social sphere, what we're talking about is the nature of bonds that go beyond rationality, that go beyond self-interest, or that intertwine with rationality and self-interest in different ways. The second thing that I think is very important to bring up when you ask how love could be a transformative political force, which I think it can, is that one has to start though with the negative because love can function politically in very horrible ways and is already doing so today.

I found very useful some years ago an essay by Sara Ahmed called “In the Name of Love”2 . What she had done, was research about so-called hate groups, essentially anti-immigrant groups, racist groups. And what she quickly found is that the groups themselves, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn't think of themselves as hate groups. They thought of themselves as love groups. But they define love as love of their kind. Like, we don't hate non-white people—we just love white people: that was the kind of response she got from them. You could respond to this in several different ways. One thing you could say is, oh, but that's not love. Then you do get into the problem you were just posing with the question: what's your definition of love? A second way you could go about it, and I think that is Sara Ahmed’s result as well, is to say, okay, let's not talk about love in politics—it's dangerous territory. Love can be horrible in politics. Let's keep politics free of love. Hannah Arendt also had that notion. A third way that you could approach this, which would be mine, is that we have to differentiate among modes of love, especially in the political sphere, and affirm some and counter others. So love doesn't then become one thing. Politics of love is not just a mobilization of love in some blanket way. It's rather thinking about love in politics as a field of battle or a field of contest, something like that: here's the way you imagine love, here's the way I imagine love, and it's a struggle between those notions of love.

Therefore, from my perspective I would tend to accept the racists who say that they’re acting on notions of love. I would accept that that’s love—they call it love, I'm willing to let them call it love. But I would try to characterize what is specific to that form of love and to combat that. In their case, it's about love of sameness, and love of your own, and love of the same. What would be contesting that would be a notion of love that is based on the other, or on multiplicity, or on differences. To put it in terms that people might recognize from traditions, at least there are some ways of considering the notion of the love of neighbor as this, a notion of love of alterity. I'm sure these hate groups would propose love of neighbors as love of the person right next to me, who's like me. Instead, I would think of love of neighbor as love of those who are different, or what Walt Whitman talks about, love of the stranger. Anyway, what I’m trying to get at here, just to open up the imagination about it, is that I think there are competing forms of political love and one has to recognize and combat them. I’m not willing to abandon at least what I understand as the politics of love, just because there are hateful things and horrible things done in its name. I think rather one needs to contest them.

In the essay “For Love or Money”3 , published in 2011, where you discuss the Marxist idea of how one might extract love from the idea of ownership, you outline how the power of money works in creating bonds and that this idea could be transferred to love, without the aspect of ownership. How do you get around the problem of ownership if you're thinking in terms of how love might operate in the same way, power-wise, as money?

They operate in the same way only in the sense that money enforces bonds, social bonds, in a certain way. Love should also create and maintain social bonds, but of course in a different way than money does. I think this is the essence of love as a social concept that we have from very long ago, a long-standing notion that love is the strongest of bonds. If love is the strongest of bonds, it does have to have a political and social relevance. And those strongest of bonds are not necessarily based on genetic relations, they're not necessarily based on marriage vows. They can be based on other things, and this is why I found that Che Guevara expression very useful. They can be based on a political common struggle. That's another way that bonds can function.

As a motor of both transformation and duration, love is not only something where you encounter difference, but it makes you yourself become different. I think that's a very vital point in your concept of a politics of love.

I think you're absolutely right that maybe we've got two criteria for understanding love in this social and political context. One is the duration, the lasting quality of the bonds, but the second is its transformative quality, like you say. I think both of these are things that everybody already understands about love, because love always changes you. Otherwise, it's not really love. But it's certainly also true in the political sphere. This sense of love in political actions, I think, is quite common for all activists. You recognize the way that you're changed by political encounters and that kind of transformation. If we put together those two things, I think we already have a relatively good basis for thinking about love in the political sphere, a duration of bonds and transformation. I don't want to say transformation of self, because it doesn't happen in an individual way. But we are transformed in our political encounters together.

It’s also interesting to note that there is a third category where you state that political love is both based on reason and passion. The idea of reason runs counter to the traditional notion of love that implies that love is something that hits you from outside, an emotion you can't grasp, where passions run wild, and cause profound inner disruption. The aspect of reason is missing in that concept of love. So how is reason crucial to a politics of love?

I just want to take a step back to underline something that you’re already saying, which I think is quite important. It’s not useful to think of politics just in terms of reason and interest. That’s not how we can explain our contemporary politics, or even our transformational politics. On the other hand, reason alone, or interests alone, are not an adequate framework for thinking about politics. We also have to think about politics in terms of the passions and affects. This is what drives other people's politics, so it's a kind of analytical tool, but also our own. And then the second moment is the question of how can we understand the passions and actions, or reason and emotions, not as two separate categories, but as interacting with each other? And I think here, again, love is a helpful concept, because there is a substantial, long philosophical and political tradition that does think of love in these ways. Baruch Spinoza is excellent in this regard, partly because one always runs into this danger that I've often found when talking about love and politics, which is the sentimental nature of it, that people assume that love is a sentimental question and therefore popular songs come to mind, or something in that vein. Spinoza's basic concept defines love as joy with the recognition of an external cause. And joy, in its turn, is the increase of my ability to think and to act. That's maybe the way that one could translate this to our colloquial sense of understanding love, the joy being the expansion of my ability to think and to act.

What he's saying is that one should form bonds with such people to make that encounter repeat. So that if you have a study group or a collective or other intellectual project with people that increases your power to think, that's a kind of love. And it needs to be lasting, you need the duration of that. There's also a transformative character to it, in that being with that group of people, thinking with that group of people, transforms me. Love, in this case, requires that I integrate those people into my life and create a bond that way. Joy in Spinoza’s sense increases your power to think and to act. And that seems to me already a useful notion of love. For Spinoza, there's no difference between reason and emotion in that process. It’s perfectly suffused with reason and completely embedded with emotions or passions. I wanted to go through that example, partly because I like the example, but also because it destabilizes a bit this notion about love being irrational, which I see no reason to accept.

Which is a widespread cliché though.

It's a commonplace, and just to go back a minute to those quite radical left thinkers who think love should be excluded from politics, they're also thinking along these lines that because love is irrational and just creates chaos, let's exclude love from politics. I think that is the reasoning of these authors.

And vice versa, if you think of politics in a negative sense as something evil, a form of control or power play, then it becomes a phenomenon you don't really want to have in the field of love.

So on the one hand, we have people who want to protect politics from love, on the other, we have people who want to protect love from politics. I see what you're saying, yes.

Which is perhaps why the conflation of love and politics is so highly charged, but also has the power to create change in the social realm. And yet, in my view, for a political sense of love to serve as a catalyst for transformation, there needs to be a shared objective.

I think the objectives remain multiple in a movement. It’s the links among them, and the kinds of social relations that are created, which are what I’m trying to work at as primary.

Doesn’t there need to be some kind of common ground, or common sense, an idea that one shares that serves as a bonding material? How can collectives organize themselves across boundaries of various kinds to actually implement transformation? How can we go about change in the massive sense that we would need to in order to save the planet, for instance? I mean, this kind of total rethinking of how we deal with our love towards not only each other, our neighbors, but also the neighbor that is our earth: how do we do that? Today, we have the possibility, in virtual reality at least, to connect with people from all over the place. But I would argue that we do need to feel that something is connecting us in some way or another.

For me, and this is due to the traditions I'm part of, I would think of what you're talking about in terms of internationalism and really internationalism of struggles. Those are the kind of things that I would look towards today that pose greater possibilities. Thinking about movements like the Woman, Life, Freedom (Jin, Jiyan, Azadî) Movement in Iran, or revolutionary committees in Sudan, or feminist movements in Latin America, the articulation among these struggles seems to me something that's quite powerful. The instinct Toni and I had when we were writing Empire so long ago was that it's not like capital invented globalization. There was proletarian internationalism before there was capitalist globalization. Capitalist globalization in some ways was a reaction. So maybe we can think about and resurrect the traditions of international or transnational bonds of struggles that go beyond this. My way of thinking this is not so much at the individual level. It's more like that there are specific struggles in each location, which of course have their very different characteristics and objectives, but nonetheless recognize the common ground, or common sense of liberation that they share.

We started out talking about property in terms of intimate bonds, about the couple, the family, how they're defined by property, and how to think outside of it. Climate change activism is all about the recognition that the planet itself, or resources, are being conceived as property, and that even up to now the dominant proposed solutions have all been about making it more about property, about carbon exchanges, or that we need to create markets for this, and so on. It’s become common sense within the climate change movement that property is an obstacle, not a solution. If you talk about love for the world or what it means to have love for the world, I think that the notion about love for the world that’s not based on property is a very real and driving force. Going back to your earlier question of why did I start this, I think primarily for me, I came to it through the activist route. In my experience, especially younger activists immediately understand love as their driving force. So in part, I was driven by trying to work out what that common shared feeling is. You know, the way that we're transformed by political action, the way that we create bonds and political action, and that we recognize both of those experiences as pre-figurative of the world we want to create.

This also recalls how artists who engage in activism create change today. Increasingly, artists are no longer acting by themselves, but rather in collectives because together you can come up with something more multi-voiced, or multi-perspectival. The artist and ecological activist, Joseph Beuys, claimed that society in itself is an artwork, and we as members of society all participate in creating this artwork. But this also entails that we are responsible that it becomes an artwork that makes us all happy in its multitudinousness, so to speak. Does this resonate with what you are thinking of in terms of a politics of love?

Sure, and I totally understand how artists are able to confront social and political problems from a different perspective. In some ways, not only the medium, the manner of acting and thinking can open up problems that seem unresolvable from other perspectives. That seems totally right to me. Both of us have been saying how challenging it is with our inherited modes of thought to think about love as a political concept. It's a perfect opportunity to approach this differently, as artists do. So that totally makes sense to me.

You were mentioning that love, political love, or love per se, has the power to open up new worlds. That's something that art can also do. It can make you see things that you never saw before, that you never heard before. And thus I think that the realm of art is a good place to start with the politics of love, not only in the field of political struggle, by opening the mind and the gaze to something different, to a world that you have not yet experienced, seen, or heard of.

What you just said is a good translation of the Marx quote that I gave at the very beginning, that when he's trying to understand communism as a transformation of all of our organs of interaction with the world, a new seeing, a new feeling, a new thinking, it's exactly what you're trying to describe here. And so it seems to me it's functioning at all the different levels we've been discussing—I mean, in intimate, personal interactions, in social forms, in collectives, etcetera. I'm totally in agreement and interested in that aspect and potential of art practice.

We are living in extremely divisive times with wars and massive hatred being wielded against other people, groups of people, or nations. Is there even a place for a politics of love at this point? Or is it even more important than ever to remedy this situation?

I certainly agree with what you're implying, that in the current multifaceted disaster a politics of love is ever more important. But I think that approaching it that way might lead to a dead end or misunderstanding. Because I think that pursuing struggles for liberation has to be a foundation. And that then one can recognize that those take place and they are oriented with the politics of love. But the danger of just saying love in this context is that one could somehow defang all of the horrible things going on in the world and all the forms of oppression simply by declaring peace. I think we need to fight. And I don't see love as being exclusive from that fight. I also think that the discourse about peace can be misleading in that regard too. Because so often what people declare as peace is really forms of domination and oppression. So I guess I would say that if our goals are love and peace, and they are, they can only be arrived at through combat. Action, struggle, combat. I mean, there are many things that need to be combated. And we can't be passive.

Do you think that the concept of a politics of love can still actively lead to change?

Go talk to young people at a demonstration and see what they think. I would say that it's still alive in them. The fact that it's alive in them maybe is a mandate that we should heed and act on.

The conversation between Michael Hardt and Belinda Grace Gardner took place via Zoom on June 26, 2024.

Dr. Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Together with Antonio Negri he is author of the Empire trilogy—Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), which investigates the political, legal, economic, and social aspects of globalization. His latest book is The Subversive Seventies (2023). His writings on the “politics of love” span over two decades and are also the subject of the 2014 video work every day words disappear / Michael Hardt on the politics of love by the Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez.