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How To Do Politics With Love

Conference Paper · October 2015

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 How To Do Politics With Love
Pedagogy and Politics in Hardt and Negri
and Deleuze and Guattari

Hannah Stark
University of Tasmania

Timothy Laurie
University of Melbourne

Laurie, Timothy and Hannah Stark (2015) ‘How To Do Politics With Love’, Capitalism and Schizophrenia:
Conference for the Cluster for Organizations Society and Markets (COSM), University of Melbourne,
September 24.

If for a range of bitterly adversarial intellectual traditions, the “market” continues

to provide a certain truth about social reproduction, then “love” is almost never
the truth about social reproduction. In the undergraduate classroom, love is less
likely to be encountered as a concept for inquiry and modification, than as a
readymade tool for explaining how bourgeois society produces collective
mystifications. Given the vast weaponry of intellectual truisms we could throw
against the concept of love, its persistence in the popular imagination is
somewhat miraculous. Love is the Donald Trump of feminist critical theory. And
like Donald Trump, it is easy to say that beneath the spectacle of love, a hidden
transaction has taken place. Both spectacular and mundane iterations of romantic
love can always be shown to originate elsewhere – in religious doctrine and sexual
morality; in gender identities and Oedipal dramas; in the conjectures of romance
fiction; and of course, in the economies of unpaid domestic labour. And we have
reason to be suspicious: the unquestionable value of “love” as a social good is
constantly invoked to simply and sabotage coherent debates around adoption
rights, child sexual abuse, family custody and child support, sexual consent,
domestic labour, spousal health care entitlements, workplace harassment,
contraceptive technologies and reproductive rights.

Social theorists have therefore criticised the concept of love along the following
lines. Firstly, love is an ideological concept that has historically served to
naturalise heteronormative social relations, and thus must be rejected on political
grounds. Secondly, love is a derivative concept in relation to desire, and thus must
be rejected on analytical grounds. Thirdly, love is not amenable to thorough
empirical scrutiny, and thus must be rejected on methodological grounds.

Nevertheless, efforts to debunk the ideology of love frequently miss their mark.
For those convinced that love exists, sociological explanations do not hold water
against our attachments to at least one remembered event, the arrival of love,
and the object of that event, that which was or is loved. The epistemological
question, “how do we gain knowledge of love?”, is somehow thrown off, by the
unstudied conviction that we have always-already known love.
Before love has even been given a definition, we feel forced to make a choice.
Either we seek explanations for love in the social order, or we posit – at some
considerable epistemological risk – that love is an innately known thing, and that
our task in studying love is to explicate this shared experience.

In this paper, we want to consider an ontological approach to love taken in

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude (2004), as part of a broader study
that considers Deleuzian and post-Deleuzian philosophy in relation to intimacy,
love and feminism. We want to acknowledge from the outset a strong lineage of
feminist scholarship directly concerned with critical investigation into the concept
of love, not least of all Simone de Beauvoir’s chapter ‘The Woman in Love’ in The
Second Sex, Linnell Secomb’s thorough and exciting Philosophy and Love: From
Plato to Popular Culture (Secomb 2007), and Lauren Berlant’s work on the theme
(e.g. Berlant 2012) which we have already discussed elsewhere at this
conference.1 Nevertheless, we hope to overcome the damaging but often
tenacious estrangement between Marxist critical theory concerned with markets,
and feminist theory concerned with interpersonal ethics, by re-reading
contemporary political philosophy with “love” as our key concept.

There are some obvious differences between Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and we don’t need to point them out to you
here. At every turn, there’s a different use of affect, of politics, of power. What
we want to show in this paper is that when Hardt and Negri talk love in the
context of politics, they might actually mean learning. Conversely, when Gilles
Deleuze uses the word love in the context of learning, he might also be talking
about politics. This shuffle between three terms – love, learning, and politics – is
something we think both Deleuze scholars and Hardt and Negri scholars, as well
as theorists of love and intimacy more broadly, need to take seriously.

Hardt and Negri are critical theorists who respond to certain limitations within
Western Marxist political philosophy, but nevertheless work on problems that
belong to that intellectual lineage. In particular, they’re interested in problems of
political organisation. Put simply, when people get together and do things in
groups, is it because they share the same interests? Well, often not – Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have already talked at length about this problem for
Marxist approaches to proletarian action.2 Is it because people in groups
recognise each other as citizens, as equals, as comrades? Well, this depends on a
politics of collective recognition, and the tools that we’re given to recognise
others as political allies are mediated by forms of representation shaped by
gender, sexuality, race, class, nationality, and so on.

In this context, love for Hardt and Negri becomes a conceptual pivot to solve a
problem of collective belonging. “The multitude,” write Hardt and Negri, “is an
internally different, multiple social subject whose constitution and action is based
not on identity or unity … but on what it has in common”.3 Multitude describes a
collective political force, mobilised by common experiences and cooperative

How To Do Politics With Love 2|P a g e

practices, that does not erase differences such as race, class and sexuality. Rather,
as Hardt and Negri put it, the multitude is “composed of radical differences,
singularities, that can never be synthesised into an identity”.4 It is a collective
assembling of human energies capable of productions including new ideas,
practices, objects and affects, as well as the biopolitical production of material
goods and immaterial labour. This is a form of immanent social organisation in the
manner of “an orchestra with no conductor”.5 If the post-Marxism of Laclau and
Mouffe posits the necessity of every political protest containing multiple placards,
representing overlapping but non-identical demands, then Hardt and Negri
foreground the materiality of banner-making itself. Collective action in doing
things together, around shared projects – what they call the common – is part of
the process by which political groups acquire legitimacy.6

For Hardt and Negri, love assembles things, and collective cooperation only works
because people are loving. It makes less sense to say that love is a social
construction than to say that love constructs society. To be a social being is to be
capable of love. In texts committed to the thematics of life in the face of death,
and to the political potential of the “social flesh” against the lead weights of
sovereign power, one cannot be surprised that love makes short but powerful
contributions to Multitude and Commonwealth (2011), and also to Negri’s Time
for Revolution (2013).

Hardt and Negri recognise that love is frequently trapped in the private realm of
the “bourgeois couple” and for this reason they insist that we need “a more
generous and unrestrained conception of love”.7 Their work points to the
possibility of freeing love from the bourgeois private family so that its power as a
social and political force can be realised. However, they caution, “[t]his does not
mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means
that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political
projects in common and the construction of a new society”.8 They are arguing
that our love can be bigger, and that this love will be the material for the
construction of a new society.

Across their works, Hardt and Negri paint a portrait of what we will call the
Modern Lover. The properly political love of the modern lover creates
attachments both “intimate and social”, disrupting the distinction between
“public and private”. Our modern lover operates “in a field of multiplicity and
function through not unification but the encounter and interaction of
differences”.9 Through these encounters, modern lovers are transformed such
that they – or we – become different through encountering differences in others.

And of course, the modern lover has bookshelves lined with Marx, and knows this
quote well: “love, in contrast to money, operates through proper exchanges, and
thus maintains the singularity of our human powers”.10 The modern lover
overcomes heterosexuality’s monopoly on generation, life and futurity. Rather
than tying social stability to love and its institutions, the modern lover is

How To Do Politics With Love 3|P a g e

disruptive. To love well, to create the conditions by which one loves well,
everything must change – and keep changing. Modern lovers don’t sleep.

Hardt knows that the modern lover cannot be a pre-political babe-in-the-woods

type. Love is not an innocent thing that happens before society. The modern lover
could easily become enamoured by the same over the different, agreement over
disagreement, the community over its outsiders. The danger is in falling back into
what Hardt calls “love of the same” or “love becoming the same”.11 This unifying
love disarticulates itself from fundamental problems of difference, antagonism
and dissent. In conversation with Hardt, Leonard Schwartz notes that the
romantic couple form can be “potentially destructive of the existing order to the
extent that the two don’t need any third or fourth or fifth or multitude at that
point”.12 What happens when, instead of joining revolutionary actions that
anticipate better forms of political community, the modern lover gets caught up
in involutionary, obscurantist, inward-looking movements that satisfy his or her
desire to feel special, to feel unique, to feel part of an exclusive love?

Hardt describes this as a perversion of love of neighbour: we restrict ourselves to

loving those closest in geographical or genetic proximity to ourselves (the family,
the race, the nation).13 He then goes even further. Those political groupings we
like to call “evil” – “fascisms, nationalisms, racisms, certain sorts of political
fundamentalisms” – are also “forms of love”, albeit in a distorted form.14

Hardt and Negri’s Multitude embraces the spontaneity of love as a binding social
affinity. At the same time, Hardt wants to distinguish the common of the
multitude from love of the same and the various fascistic and nationalist loves.
This cannot be understood as a moral distinction. Hardt and Negri’s theory of
biopolitics is founded on a rejection morality in the Kantian tradition. We cannot
posit reason, understanding or powers of judgment as primary and superior
causes in relation to the mingling of bodies. By adopting the conceptual
mechanics of Baruch Spinoza's rationalism - powers, capacities, bodies, affects
and so on – Hardt and Negri make an important push towards a materialist model
of political processes. What appears to be a moral force can always be explained
by somebody, which doesn’t mean that we ourselves are always gifted with the
powers to explain it. Most importantly, the multitude does not exist because
somebody had the idea that it should exist. Historical, material and social
processes have produced it: Hardt and Negri just happen to be around when this
is happening. We do not will multitudes into being; they create themselves,
through processes of cooperation, and through participation in acts of love.

Love should be subject to the same order of explanation as material processes.

We should be able to explain why some loves are porous and others are blocked
by the couple form. Why do some loves lead to fascism and others to
communism? Why do some break down heteronormativity and others shore it
up?

How To Do Politics With Love 4|P a g e

Hardt and Negri don’t give us answers to these questions, and do not offer tools
to explain why love would ever take on good rather than bad forms. It’s like
reading a superhero comic without a good backstory: why does this force that
seems so powerful attach itself to the side of the multitude? What is the
prehistory of the multitude, such that its loves do not become the most fascist,
the most protective and insular, features of its collective organisation? Hardt
knows that this is a difficulty:

On the one hand, a political love must be a revolutionary force that radically
breaks with the structures of the social life we know, overthrowing its
norms and institutions. On the other hand, it must provide mechanisms of
lasting association and stable social bonds and thus create enduring
institutions. 15

Multitude is caught between the open-ended acquisition of new kinds of

knowledge and experience, and the stability of social bonds required for this to
acquire political and institutional force.

Rather than simply conclude that Hardt and Negri’s work is fraught with
contradictions, we want to tease out a key concept that could mediate these
positions. Encounters with difference make us different: participation in the
multitude is always transformative for participants. The love of the multitude is
therefore, in the specific way that Hardt and Negri use it, a process of learning.
This love is pedagogical. Hardt likens love to muscles, which become fit through
specific regimes and encounters.16 In this way, he proposes that love can be seen
as a “kind of training ground for the creation of subjectivities capable of […]
democracy”.17

Hardt and Negri’s political philosophy is centrally concerned with the permanence
of change as a condition of political action. Political groupings must therefore be
pedagogical – they must teach us things – and this pedagogy must be linked to
that which holds groups together; namely, love. It’s our hypothesis that Hardt and
Negri may actually mean the same thing by these terms. The love of the
Multitude, as a non-sentimental principle of cooperative affiliation, is dependent
on our capacity to learn.

We want to run with this idea, by turning to Gilles Deleuze’s work. There are many
significant differences between Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, but there are also
significant commonalities, particularly when it comes to love. We want to
consider here Deleuze’s Proust and Signs (1964), in which love is rendered
explicitly pedagogical. It’s here that something can be said about love and learning
than remains dormant in Hardt and Negri.

According to Deleuze’s reading of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, love is tied to

the apprenticeship of signs: “To fall in love is to individualise someone by the signs
he [sic] bears or emits”, and then to “become sensitive to these signs” belonging
to “a possible world unknown to us”, and “to try to explicate, to develop these

How To Do Politics With Love 5|P a g e

unknown worlds which remain enveloped within the beloved”.18 Love involves
explicating and developing these possible worlds through searching for the signs
of love from the beloved. This necessitates making the connective operations
required to individuate another person in a world belonging uniquely to them:
“every love is linked to associations of ideas and impression which are quite
subjective”, suggests Deleuze, and correspondingly “the end of love is identified
with the annihilation of a ‘portion’ of association, as in a stroke or when a
weakened artery breaks”.19

But as much as we search for signs of the truth behind love, something is always
withheld: “the signs of a loved person, once we ‘explicate’ them, [are] revealed as
deceptive: addressed to us, applied to us, they nonetheless express worlds which
exclude us and which the beloved will not and cannot make us know”.20

It also follows that the signs of love be extracted from any theory of forms. If the
problem of love was that of adequate formalisation, then the apprenticeship of
signs would be an aesthetic project, and its subject, a disinterested one. But the
subject of the 'search' in Proust is a subject in love. Being in love means that the
subject has been moved by a world beyond itself. The production of knowledge is
not the result of a benign truth-seeking mind; rather, “[truth] depends on an
encounter with something which forces us to think, and to seek truth”, which may
even be characterised as a “violence” to thought which guarantees “authenticity”
(Deleuze 1972, 16). Love provides a way of learning to read the signs of others –
material signs, fleeting signs, practical signs – as if they belong to a world not yet
knowable.

Of course, the search for true causes of love can also produce jealousy. By seeking
in the world of signs evidence that one is the object of someone else’s love, we
must recognise ourselves as objects among other possible objects.21 The signs of
love are mobile, and the love that we enjoy could always be directed elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the search for the meaning of a thing, even when its true causes
remain permanently hidden, is not a confusion or contradiction. Such a search
may be precisely what learning is. “To learn”, writes Deleuze, “is first of all to
consider a substance, an object, a being as if they emitted signs to be deciphered,
interpreted”.22 Both love and learning install a hope for the depth of signs in
worlds that we cannot always control and cannot completely know. Love is a
sustained apprenticeship of the life of others’ signs, whether fluid or fleshy,
articulate or rambling.

We therefore have two contrasting propositions. Firstly, that love prompts

learning and involves an apprenticeship of signs. Secondly, that the search for
absolute causes of love may be fruitless, and can even lead to jealousy and a
paranoid reorientation to the world of the lover’s signs. Both themes are found
again in A Thousand Plateaus: on the one hand, we have the characterisation of
love as a way to “seize a person in a mass, extract him or her from a group,
however small, in which he or she participates… then to find that person’s own

How To Do Politics With Love 6|P a g e

packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be
of an entirely different nature.” 23 Later, in the opening commentary on signs, we
have a wife who “looked at you with a funny expression”, a mailman who crosses
his fingers, people whispering at work. This whole world of impenetrable signs is
coordinated through jealousy, paranoia, apprehension, and most of all, by our
desire to control the mysteries of signification.

Let’s not fall into the trap of pitting Deleuze’s micro-politics against the macro
scale of Hardt and Negri’s political commentaries. Large political groups
experience problems of jealousy, of paranoia, and of the causes of collective love.
How many socialist parties have been torn apart by the zealous interrogation of
motives, of true principles, of absolute origins, and thus refused to be content
with the positivity of cooperation, of shared activity, of a loving immanent to a
doing?

There is a final twist here. Any effort to claim a monopoly on “love”, to claim to be
the person who loves the most, or the political group that is the most genuinely
collectivist and loving, runs risk of producing uncritical absolutisms. Those who
claim to act for love of the people, or for love of truth or justice may, through this
purity of vision, also enact objectionable forms of violence. This absolute love can
easily become what Hannah Arendt would describe as “not only apolitical but
antipolitical”.24

This ambivalence between love as a force that happens between people, and love
as something to be claimed or possessed, should modify the way we think about
love in Hard and Negri. One cannot treat the bonds of love as ideal types,
corresponding to virtuous political subjectivities, or evil ones, for that matter. The
notion that love shapes political formations is an important insight, but this does
not mean a political group can freely adopt one version of love over another.

To summarise, for Hardt and Negri, love is a collective power, which engenders
the assemblage of the multitude. Through exposure to the differences inherent to
the multitude, we can become new people capable of new social forms. In this
way, the multitude is utopian, endowed with a world-making capacity. The
transformative capacities of love point to its pedagogical force. We then need to
ask ourselves: what do we learn from loving others? How does this change our
identities and commitments? What does thinking of love, not just as a practice
that we are taught, but, also, as a process through which we learn, mean for how
we theorise love?

List of works cited

Arendt, Hannah (1998), The Human Condition (Second edn.; Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press).
Berlant, Lauren (2012), Desire/Love (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books).
Davis, Heather and Sarlin, Paige (2012), ''On the Risk of a New Relationality': An Interview
with Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt', Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2 (3), pp. 7-
27.

How To Do Politics With Love 7|P a g e

 De Beauvoir, Simone (1975 [1949]), The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (Middlesex,
England: Penguin Books).
Deleuze, Gilles (1972 [1964]), Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: George
Braziller).
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (2004 [1980]), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum).
Hardt, Michael (2007), 'About Love', European Graduate School, URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioopkoppabI (Accessed 24 June).
--- (2011), 'For Love or Money', Cultural Anthropology, 26 (4), pp. 676-682.
--- (2012), The Procedures of Love (Kassel, Germany: Hatje Cantz and Museum
Fridericianum).
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire (New York: Penguin Books).
Hardt, Michael and Schwartz, Leonard (2009), 'A Conversation with Michael Hardt on the
Politics of Love', Interval(le)s, 3 (1), pp. 810-821.
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2011), Commonwealth (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press).
Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal (2001), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso).
Negri, Antonio (2013), Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (London:
Bloomsbury).
Secomb, Linnell (2007), Philosophy and Love: From Plato to Popular Culture (Oxford
University Press).

1
Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Conference for the Cluster for Organizations Society and Markets,
2015.
2
Laclau and Mouffe (2001)
3
Hardt and Negri (2004: 100)
4
Ibid., at 355.
5
Ibid., at 337, 338.
6
See ibid. and also Negri (2013)
7
Hardt and Negri (2004: 351)
8
Ibid., at 352.
9
Hardt and Negri (2011: 678)
10
Ibid., at 679.
11
Hardt (2007)
12
Hardt and Schwartz (2009: 815)
13
Hardt (2011: 677)
14
Hardt and Schwartz (2009: 815) See also Hardt (2011: 677)
15
Hardt (2012: 6)
16
Hardt in Davis and Sarlin (2012: 8)
17
Hardt (2007)
18
Deleuze (1972 [1964]: 7)
19
Ibid., at 74.
20
Ibid., at 9.
21
See also De Beauvoir (1975 [1949]: 654-663)
22
Deleuze (1972 [1964]: 4)
23
Deleuze and Guattari (2004 [1980]: 39)
24
Arendt (1998: 242)

How To Do Politics With Love 8|P a g e

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