Abstract

What is love? Or, more specifically, what does it mean to love? These questions underwrite Alain Badiou's In Praise of Love, a book-length interview from 2012 on that familiar yet fugitive concept. In this atypically humanist volume, Badiou interweaves philosophical and aesthetic thought with autobiographical rumination so as to revivify the idea of love as a necessary condition for subjective vitality– or, as his ontological system would have it, as a formal procedure on an order of magnitude with science, art, and politics. Here is the book's conclusion, which approaches a summative definition: To love is to struggle, beyond solitude, with every thing in the world that can animate existence. This world where I...