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Je t'aime! Being, in Love, Between Badiou and Deleuze
What is Love? Philosophers from Haddaway to Plato have pondered this dizzying, intoxicating, and more often than not, earth-shattering phenomena. From the Butterfly Lovers to Romeo & Juliet, to Twilight, the mesmerising heights of love have historically been a faithful subject of poetry, storytelling, and philosophical rumination. However, the modern world’s relationship with love has become rather strained and complicated. Capitalist alienation and the state’s social engineering of housing and child-production has made love feel dull and mechanised, while Tinder and the multitude of dating apps available seem to leave us with little more than disappointment.
Is love dead, or have we just been thinking about it wrong? How do we grapple with the phenomena of love without mystifying it in the romanticism of fate and destiny, or dragging it to the fatalism of a scientific reduction to neurochemistry? Philosophers Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze offer defences of love escaping these pitfalls, both seeking to uncover the metaphysical origins of this thing called love, while remaining at odds with each other – raising important questions how we should love, and be loved.
This event was the first of many reading sessions as part of Bras Basah Open's Ex-Situ Residency at the Singapore Art Museum.