Politics of Love Modeled on Queer: Cruising or Community as Method?

Abstract

This essay starts with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri`s call for ＂politics of love＂ as the basis of their formulation of global resistance, which they intriguingly exemplify with gay cruising and anonymous sex. Picking up this interesting lead, the essay first seeks to substantiate their rather sketchy proposal with queer critic Leo Bersani`s provocative theorization of those very forms of queer connecting, in order to interrogate the real compatibility between the two. While it is suggested that they are in effect not an easy fit but rather illustrating the romanticization of queer on Hardt and Negri`s part, their proposal intent on conceptualizing new ways of ＂living together＂ is simply too inspiring to be given up. Therefore, in the second half of the essay, an alternative mode of substantiation is instead provided in the celebrated French debate on community between Jean-Luc Nancy, Georges Bataille (in absentia), and Maurice Blanchot, with special focus on the streak of ＂love＂ that runs through the original exchange but is largely overlooked. And also intriguingly enough, this line of thinking still ends with a rather queer tone, as Blanchot illustrates his most open formulation of love/community through Marguerite Duras`s novella The Malady of Death, which in fact is also a queer story that happens between a homosexual man and a straight woman. By providing prominent real-life examples for it (Duras herself as well as Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden), this essay concludes with arguing for this other mode of queer connecting as the more suitable exemplar of Hardt and Negri`s project of politicizing love.