Abstract:

Through a critical examination of Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s arguments about love and politics, the paper holds that Badiou’s arguments about romantic love can not lay the foundation for communist politics, but dissolve politics, and Hardt and Negri’s arguments about multitudinous love reveal feeble politics because of its lack of the perspective of the enemy. By reintroducing Carl Schmitt and Chantal Mouffe’s “friend/enemy distinction”, the paper presents the generation of friends and enemies as a Bulterian political performance and love as mutually influencing and infective affects, thus proposing a performative love which adds a friend/enemy dimension so as to truly activate the link between love and politics.

Key words: multitudinous love, affects, performative love, romantic love, friend/enemy distinction, love and politics