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The Theory of Love Ideals, Limits, Futures Timothy Laurie Hannah Stark The Theory of Love Timothy Laurie • Hannah Stark The Theory of Love Ideals, Limits, Futures Timothy Laurie Hannah Stark School of Communication School of Humanities University of Technology Sydney University of Tasmania Ultimo, NSW, Australia Hobart, TAS, Australia ISBN 978-3-030-71554-0 ISBN 978-3-030-71555-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71555-7 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland A cknowledgements This writing has been completed on the sovereign lands of the Muwinina people and the Gadigal people, and we pay our respects to their elders past, present, and emerging. We would like to thank the University of Tasmania for supporting travel to work collaboratively through a number of schemes including the Visiting Scholars Program and the School of Humanities research support scheme. We would also like to thank Professor Rita Felski, Associate Professor Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, Associate Professor Camilla Schwartz, and the University of Southern Denmark for funding to present at the “Love etc.” conference in 2019. Tim I would like to thank present and former colleagues at the University of Technology Sydney who have created a wonderful environment in which to teach and research—special mentions to Burcu Cevik-Compiegne, Chrisanthi Giotis, Mehal Krayem, Elaine Laforteza, Tara McLennan, James Meese, Bhuva Narayan, and Luke Robinson. My academic passions may have waned years ago, had it not been for wide-ranging conversations with and encouragement from Gilbert Caluya, Catherine Driscoll, Adam Gall, Liam Grealy, Jessica Kean, Meaghan Morris, Vivien Nara, Helary Ngo, Janice Richardson, and Jon Rubin. A special mention to the ever- perspicacious Remy Low, who has indulged many long conversations at the woollier ends of philosophy and cultural studies. When I return home to Adelaide with a flurry of work to do, Nicolette and John remain over- whelmingly generous in their hospitality and conversation, and for this I am ever grateful. At home, Lia Betts has been a source of joy and v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS inspiration during difficult times. Finally, I am deeply thankful for the companionship of Winnie Liu, who has been an incredibly patient and supportive presence in my life. She has also taught me to rethink the value of words and the importance of history, although I remain a slow learner. Hannah I would like to acknowledge my colleagues in the Humanities at the University of Tasmania, particularly Naomi Milthorpe and Elizabeth Leane who provided feedback on this project and on various book propos- als. I’d like to thank Katrina Schlunke whose deep and generous thinking and interlocution has enriched my academic and personal life significantly. I am profoundly grateful to Anne who has patiently supported the many research trips that sit beneath this work, including spending whole school holidays alone with our children so that I could work. As I have been writing this book my life has become richer and more complex through James and Phoebe who, with Anne, have taught me new ways to think about love, care, family, and politics. c ontents 1 I ntroduction 1 2 How to Do Politics with Love 5 3 Singledom in the Future Tense: Lobster, Unicorn, Horse 29 4 Coupling Anyway: Love as Becoming 45 5 The Limits of Love: On Forgiveness 61 6 Conclusion: Towards a Post-Sentimental Concept of Love 75 Bibliography 77 Index 85 vii CHAPTER 1 Introduction If scholars have anything to contribute to the question of love, it may be to disabuse ourselves of bad love stories. Popular representations of love are, after all, saturated with flimsy clichés. To theorise love might mean to clean up the sloppy thinking of lovesick minds, and to get along with the proper work of finding principles that hold and rules that stick. Conversely, scholarly ruminations about the nature of love—its scope and character, strengths and shortcomings, histories and future—may read as naïve and utopian, or worse, as the infiltration of self-help into academic prose. But when we tell people that we are researching love, the contradictions and inconsistencies of love are not the concerns that come to mind. Instead, people are interested in knowing what makes love so compelling as a force in their lives or the lives of others—indeed, so compelling that we pin our hopes on the flimsy clichés, against all better judgement.1 In this spirit, we heed Rita Felski’s recommendation to “expand our repertoire of critical moods” when engaging in cultural analysis: “Why are we so hyperarticu- late about our adversaries”, she writes, “and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves”?2 We think that more imaginative stories need to be told about love. To love with imagination is to lay the groundwork for better modes of collective co-existence, and we benefit from difficult conversations about the connections between our personal attachments and the wider communi- ties for which we strive—or from which we flee. Some stories seek to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1 Switzerland AG 2021 T. Laurie, H. Stark, The Theory of Love, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71555-7_1 2 T. LAURIE AND H. STARK expose the gap between our inner fantasies about love and the harsh reali- ties of everyday romantic life. We have no quarrel with such stories: the failure of love can provide vital lessons about the role of disappointment and defeat in generating new kinds of political energy. But other stories run roughshod over the quotidian altogether, inviting new ways of living together. We do not pretend to know which stories will best serve political projects to make the world more just, and we cannot promise that explic- itly feminist stories will appeal to those who identify as feminists, or that queer love plots will satisfy queer audiences. Stories about love can invite promiscuous identifications, and those that resonate may not offer the best political lessons. But we can at least explore the kinds of worlds that can be imagined through love, elevated by the promise of new ways to affect and be affected by others. The Theory of Love is concerned with practices of love outside and beyond monogamous heterosexual coupledom. In the context of interna- tional marriage equality campaigns, love has become a locus of debates around the role of the State in recognising emergent forms of intimacy and sexuality, against a backdrop where many States still enforce punitive laws around homosexuality and so-called sexual morality.3 Although our focus is not on rights-based political demands, this book offers a variety of ethical frames through which to understand changing definitions of love in the context of novel post-nuclear forms of kinship and care. Pushing beyond the false choice between collective action and individual pleasures, we attempt to circumvent the moral schemas that position love either as a supreme metaphysical virtue or as a weak panacea for the ills of capitalist societies. “[It’s] the binary of normative/transgressive that’s unsustain- able”, writes Maggie Nelson, “along with the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing”.4 We begin by addressing love as a social problem within critical theory. On one hand, love reproduces the existing social order by consolidating and naturalising our attachments to the status quo, and this has been a concern for feminist commentaries on sexual politics. As Kate Millett famously argued in 1970, “romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit … [and] obscures the reali- ties of female status and the burden of economic dependency”.5 On the other hand, love also belongs to what Michael Warner calls an “antino- mian tradition”, negating any rule or law that would seek to constrain it, and prompting desire to roam freely beyond custom and convention.6 Love could be an archetypal symbol of cultural order, or a wild refusal of 1 INTRODUCTION 3 that same order. Chapter 2 does not seek to reconcile these approaches, or to replace ordinary speech with a meta-language about love. Instead, we map the doubt and ambivalence generated by this tension within love itself through engagement with contemporary Marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist philosophy. The three chapters that follow explore three key figures of love: the single person, the couple, and the unlovable Other. Singledom is often understood either as a simple negation of love, without form or substance, or as a transitional period—“recently single”—to be quickly overcome. Drawing together Yorgos Lanthimos’ film The Lobster (2015), Lucy Gillespie’s web series Unicornland (2017), and Amy Bonnaffons’ short story “Horse” from her collection The Wrong Heaven (2018), Chap. 3 considers the possibility of singledom as something for which people might strive against the demands of heteronormativity and mononormativity. Chapter 4 turns to the couple as a temporal configura- tion of love. Paul B. Preciado’s manifesto Testo Junkie (2008) and Maggie Nelson’s novel The Argonauts (2015) present intimate relationships sus- tained in and through corporeal transformation or “becomings”—gender transition, pregnancy, and ageing. Mapping the intersection of trans and queer theory with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Chap. 4 also reflects on the limitations of post-identitarian political para- digms. At the limits of love, finally, is the one who cannot be loved. Chapter 5 reflects on possibilities for shared futures with unlovable others, placing Hannah Arendt’s influential rejection of love in politics alongside the strained process of forgiveness in the Belgian film Le Fils (The Son, 2002). The Theory of Love does not explain whether love is good or bad for politics. In some circumstances, love can be catastrophic. We do not defend love from its detractors, nor do we make yet another argument— there are already so many—that love needs some metaphysical guidance from moral philosophy. We have stopped believing those who tell us that some loves are intrinsically more enduring than others, or that some loves are oriented towards better objects than others. This book simply asks for ideas and practices of love to be more imaginative. The routine procession of heterosexual couples needs some time on hiatus, not because couples are bad or insufficiently radical but simply because we need more practice in loving without convention, consecration, or habit. How might love be extended to construct alternative social imaginaries? What kind of world is love capable of making? Could we risk a non- sentimental or post-sentimental concept of love?