Love's bite is deeper, Tiger

The best-paid sports star in the world barricaded himself at home and apologised for his ‘transgressions’ and ‘failings’. But this did not stop the alleged ‘love cheat’ being lectured about Truth with a capital T. Indeed, so many words ring false in this modern chronicle of love: hero, zero, recompense — as well as truth.

If this saga proves one thing, it is not Woods’s ‘malice’, but that love is threatened by the world’s two leading ideologies: libertarianism and liberalism. These two 21st-century diseases concur to make us believe that love is a risk not worth taking: as if we could have, on one hand, a safe conjugality; and on the other, sexual arrangements that will spare us the dangers of passion. Both are illusions.

In a remarkable book that has just come out called ‘Eloge de l’Amour’ (Eulogy of Love), the French philosopher Alain Badiou ponders on the nature of love, and how Judaism, Christianity, philosophy, politics and art have in turn treated and considered this universal event: the bursting on to the stage of our lives of this most unruly agent.

Love without suffering!

Badiou was struck by an advertising campaign last year for Meetic, a European dating website. Its slogans: “Get Love without the hazards!”; “You can love without falling in love”; and “You can love without suffering!” In other words, Meetic offers the public 100% Guaranteed Risk Free Love. This prompted Badiou to comment:

“Love without the fall, love without the risks, is just another piece of propaganda, just like the presumed security of arranged marriages or, for that matter, the American invention of a zero-casualty war. Love is what gives our life intensity and meaning, thus full of risks, in my opinion worth taking.” For the philosopher, the other threat to love today is the liberal dogma: one that denies love its importance by making it another extension of hedonism and consumerism.

As Rimbaud said, “Love must be reinvented” — against the dictatorship of security and comfort. Placing himself between the extremes represented by Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Kierkegaard’s absolute, Badiou starts from Plato — for whom love is an elan towards idealism — and distances himself from French moralists, who traditionally view love as the ornament to desire and sexual jealousy. For him, love is not truth, but a construction of the truth with someone who is not identical but different. It is also a pig-headed attempt to make an event last in time. “Obstinacy is a strong element of love.”

Opinions differ

Artists have always preferred the figure of love as an all-consuming encounter, revolutionary perhaps, but doomed from the start, as in André Breton’s ‘Nadja’. In the arts, obstinate love hasn’t much inspired artists. Except one perhaps: in Samuel Beckett, Badiou sees the real champion of love. For Badiou, Beckett’s Happy Days is far more romantic than Tristan and Isolde. “Think of this old couple who have pigheadly loved each other: magnificent!” Badiou refutes the romantic notion of fusion and the dissolution of oneself in the other’s gaze. He insists that love is built on the alterity between lovers, and says — in opposition to religious thinkers — that children are steps along the way, not love’s final destination.

For all these reasons, Badiou links love to revolution and resistance: a revolution because it implies contradictions and violence; and a resistance to today’s tyranny of puritanical lecturing, hypocritical public confession, naming and shaming, and the ultimate fantasy — the infallible hero.