Alain Badiou's "Love Under Threat" (Summary)

In his work The Meaning of Sarkozy, Alains Badiou argues that love faces threats from all sides, including arranged marriages and the promotion of "zero risk" love. He believes that the Meetic internet dating site, which offers "coaching in love," is a safety-first concept of love, providing comprehensive insurance against all risks. This approach is similar to the propaganda of the American army when promoting the idea of "smart" bombs and "zero dead" wars.

The first threat to love is the safety threat, as it is not so very different to an arranged marriage, done in the name of family order and hierarchy by despotic parents. Love is not done in the name of family order and hierarchy by despotic parents, but in the name of safety for the individuals involved through advance agreements that avoid randomness, chance encounters, and existential poetry due to the categorical absence of risks.

The second threat love faces is to deny its importance, as the counterpoint to the safety threat is the idea that love is only a variant of rampant hedonism and the wide range of possible enjoyment. The aim is to avoid any immediate challenge or deep and genuine experience of the otherness from which love is woven. However, Meetic's publicity, like the propaganda for imperial armies, says that the risks will be everyone else's. 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 doesn't belong to modernity either.

Safety-first love 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. Love confronts two enemies: safety guaranteed by an insurance policy and the comfort zone limited by regulated pleasures.

There is a kind of pact between libertarian and libertarian ideas on love, with liberals and libertarians converge around the idea that love is a futile risk. On one hand, you can have a well-planned marriage pursued with all the delights of consummation and on the other, fun sexual arrangements full of pleasure if you disregard passion. Seen from this perspective, love in today's world is caught in this bind, in this vicious circle, and is consequently under threat.

It is the task of philosophy and other fields to rally to its defense, and that probably means, as the poet Rambaud said, that love must also need re-inventing. It cannot be a defensive action simply to maintain the status quo; the world is full of new developments, and love must also be something that innovates. Risk and adventure must be re-invented against safety and comfort.