LOVE

The “relationsh between “base” and “super ructure” has been mechanically m under ood ... Marx’s concept of h tory as a whole was based on the conviction that there ex ts an objective development conta g with it the formation of a subjective factor ... Intellectual production does not follow material production but occures s ultaneously .... the ideas of the rulers are the dom ant ideas, but not the only ones, of the epoch”

Homo Faber (Creative Labour of Self-Creation)

Karl Marx

- ‘marriage in its present form [is] “a form of exclusive private property”’ What does it say about “human nature” that “the other person ... has become one of his [material] needs”? It is as if human nature stands outside of man as a part of silent, immovable Nature. “It follows from the character of this relationship how far man has become ... a species-being , a human being.”

- “Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours ... when it is ... utilized in some way.”

Alain Badiou

Love is reducible neither to the enjoyment of sex alone, nor to a fusion of two into One in the form of coupledom/marriage (neither (a) fondness that shrinks from misunderstandings, nor (b) negotiated endurance that leaves one of the two feeling forever subordinated, nor (c) as a pragmatic arms-length contract).

* Key Reference: Alain Badiou. In Praise of Love.

- Love “is an existential project: to construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity ... Selfishness, not any rival, is love’s enemy. One could say: my love’s main enemy, the one I must defeat, is not the other, it is myself, the “myself” that prefers identity to difference, that prefers to impose its world against the world re-constructed through the filter of difference ... we can also say that love is communist in that sense, if one accepts, as I do, that the real subject of a love is the becoming of the [Two scene] and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts. Yet another possible definition of love: minimal communism!”

What is communism?