People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but, according to Michael Hardt, a certain concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the “multitude”, the modern concept of love being almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has indeed become a strictly private affair – but, according to Hardt, we would need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love – starting with the recognition that in certain political actions, in certain political demonstrations you do have a feeling of something really like love. And so, it’s partly a way of trying to theorize that recognition of this feeling of a “collective transformation” that one experiences in certain kinds of political action. And therefore, to think about love, love which should be precisely this transformative power, something in which we come out different. And to try to think of it as a political concept. Certainly, when one starts talking about love as a political concept, it’s hard to avoid religious traditions. Still, in Judaic and Christian traditions, love has often been deployed as a political concept, as the construction of the community, precisely. And it seems that today, some forces want to overcome the “segregation” or “confinement” of love into love of the same, love within the family, or even love of the race. Indeed, love of those like yourself has destroyed the possibility of love as a more generous and positive political concept. It’s the political possibility of love that has been destroyed and remains to be rediscovered.
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