Abstract

Love and Difference: Refuting the ‘Risk-Free’ Conception of Romance Love, as a philosophical topic, has a convoluted history. Modern considerations of love, which inherit this history, oscillate within a spectrum that ranges from pessimistic conceptions of love as merely instrumental reproductive sexuality, to an ecstatic fusion that presents love as the harmony of two into one. Each of these positions can be characterized as difference-evading, escapist, and ‘risk-free’ approaches to love, which, Alain Badiou claims, denies the necessary elements that make love possible; namely, a commitment to chance, the experience of vulnerability, and perseverance and fidelity in love. By way of Badiou, this paper attempts a refutation of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic rejection of love, and, following this, attempts to think beyond the relationship of insecurity and dependency that Beauvoir associates with the plight of the ‘woman-in-love.’ As I intend to show, Badiou’s theory of love, which is existential in nature, denies the escapism that is inherent to riskless love. Badiou’s solution to both the pessimistic and fusional hypotheses is to present authentic love as a ‘truth procedure’ wherein lovers form a common subject known as “the Two” which operates beyond the non-connected and incommensurable positions Badiou calls ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ This re-invented conception of love fills up and compensates this non-related Two, who, together, experience a truth made possible by difference—a pursuit which requires the continuous declaration and affirmation that the procedure is worth the risk.