Alain Badiou is a french philosopher and professor at European Graduate School. He is a Marxist and has been called a contemporary Plato.
His latest book, In Praise of Love <a series of interviews conducted by Nicolas Truong w/Badiou>, is at heart a cleverly formed argument against online dating (OLD) agencies – that OLD is deleting love. This book is a quick read and very approachable (a welcome consolation in the irritating circuit of philosophy).
“We must re-invent love but also quite simply defend it, because it faces threats from all sides.” It is in reaction to posters for an European internet dating-site, Meetic (the particular), and a collective mutation/transfiguration of modern love-action/language-representation (the general), that he takes up his sword-pen against and strikes. The slogans: “Get love without chance!” and “Be in love without falling in love!” and “Get Perfect love without suffering!” Badiou parses out the constituents of love and risk, he says, is a major ingredient. Love cannot exist truly without the randomness involved. It’s like cracking an egg but finding it full of water rather than yolk and substance.
He argues that the language of these dating companies is deceitful and parallels it to modern American wartime propaganda such as “smart” bombs and “zero dead” wars. Such terms are deceitful because there is risk and there will be deaths. This type of language conditions us to be cold and calculating.
“If you have been well trained for love, following the canons of modern safety, you won’t find it difficult to dispatch the other person if they do not suit. If he suffers, that’s his problem, right? He’s not a part of modernity. In the same way that “zero deaths” apply only to the Western military. The bombs they drop kill a lot of people who are to blame for living underneath. But these casualties are Afghans, Palestinians… They don’t belong to modernity either. Safety-first love, like everything governed by the norm of sayfety, implies the absence of risks for people who have a good insurance policy, a good army, a good police force, a good psychological take on personal hedonism, and all risks for those on the opposite side.”
The risk is not for you, the consumer of this love-commodity, who can easily discard the perfect compatibility, no surprises here, sameness-as-you match and move on to the next Prada-mini-tote-of-a-person drummed out of an algorithm computed by photo likes of possible lovers and the answers to an intimate questionnaire. The “zero death” war is true only when you can forget about the other side of the equation, and today the commodity most desirable is ignorance, which will decay the fabric of any truly good thing. To be able to forget, to not experience the reality of the situation, is what is being tailored for us, and as Badiou suggests, love is at risk to this bourgeois virus, which can be restated as _everything good is at risk.
“You must have noticed how we are always being told that things are being dealt with ‘for your comfort and safety’, from potholes in pavements to police patrols in the metro. Love confronts two enemies, essentially: safety guaranteed by an insurance policy and the comfort zone limited by regulated pleasures.”
If this is the age of ‘convenience is king’, we must be very vigilant, because while our heads are turned and while we take our ignorance pills and sleep very very well, horrors will happen. Love is the killer of this fetishized ego-centrism, and I think Badiou is right.
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