Amore per Tutti 1. 6:4 | 2003 Filip Kovacevic 1. James R.

. Martel, Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy, and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (New York: Routledge, 2001) 2. 1. 2. 3. James R. Martel is not a Romantic. He finds it problematic to love what is traditionally defined as love. His book is an effort to uncover the unequal relations of power implicit in the concept of love ("the doctrine of love," as he calls it) and demonstrate the corrosive influence of this concept on political theories which adopt it unquestioningly. Martel claims that the traditional definitions of love as eros, as agape, or even as a synthesis between the two, all fail to construct a genuinely democratic subject, a subject whose freedom would not depend on the physical and psychological subordination of itself and/or other subjects. In his words, all traditional definitions of love are premised on "human inadequacy, the need to be filled with the divine, and a [hierarchical] ordering of human beings" (p. 10). Hence the subject that these definitions bring into being cannot but be lacking and "hollowed out," unable to become the source of ethical authority and political sovereignty. The particular focus of Martel's book is the interplay between the doctrine of love and liberal political theory. He argues that the difficulties that contemporary liberal theorists face in trying to devise frameworks for a liberal democratic community stem from the incorporation of the doctrine of love into liberalism by the originators of liberal thought. In fact, Martel devotes the greater part of his book to highlighting the role that the doctrine of love played in the works of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and their American disciples Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He contends that the presence of the doctrine of love in these works subverts their democratic potential. In the last chapter of the book, Martel offers an alternative to the doctrine of love and its constitution of the subject, which he locates in the works of Thomas Hobbes. Martel's understanding of this alternative vision of love is influenced by recent works of Jacques Derrida, as well as by Derrida's interpretation of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas. Yet, as Martel admits, the most that Derrida can offer is an elusive hope ("the perhaps") that a community based on the new set of values can spring into existence. As I will indicate below, I think that this conclusion is not entirely satisfactory and that the kind of community that Martel desires to see has been concretely elaborated in the works of early Marx, and/or the early Frankfurt School theorist, Herbert Marcuse. It is therefore surprising to note the near absence of these thinkers in Martel's book insofar as the alternatives to the hierarchical doctrine of love are examined. Marx for instance appears briefly in two footnotes, but there is no substantive engagement with his work.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. It seems to me that the chapter on John Locke presents Martel's basic argument in a particularly effective fashion. In a close reading of a variety of Locke's writings, Martel reveals a conceptual ghost that he claims haunts all subsequent liberal theorizing. What gives life to this ghost is Locke's unwillingness to see the human subject as the ground of all possible knowledge. Martel claims that Locke offers us only a qualified empiricism, which authenticates our knowledge only in relation to the existence of the loving divine being. Though he does so implicitly, Locke still postulates the existence of truths beyond reason, the access to which is possible only through a submissive relationship to the divine and/or to those who represent the divine on earth (conceptualized as the most rational, the experts). Hence, Lockean reason, just like eros in the ancient doctrine of love, is always lacking and depends on an external, superior entity to offer it the sense of certainty. Instead of an egalitarian relation necessary for a democratic polity, what is being inscribed here is a relation of hierarchy. Martel argues that this hierarchical relation between the divine being and even the most rational subject is replicated in Locke's understanding of social and political relations, and especially in reference to social categories such as class, gender, or fatherhood. In other words, Locke premises the relation of the poor toward the rich, the female toward the male, or the son toward the father, on the lack of the former and the benevolence of the latter. Notwithstanding his secularizing efforts, Locke does not really part ways with the Aristotelian chain of being, or "the community of reason" (p. 50), in which those at the top can capriciously patronize and exploit those below. As a result, the subjects or selves of Lockean liberalism cannot but remain "shifting, unbounded, and non-autonomous" (p. 69), and hence incapable of constructing a genuinely democratic community. In the following chapter on Rousseau, Martel shows that Rousseau was aware of this problematic aspect of liberal theory, but that at the same time he was unable to work out a satisfactory solution. In his quest to found a relation that would wed love and autonomy, Rousseau even made his own personal life into an experimental laboratory. Martel offers a convincing reading of Rousseau's attempts, demonstrating that those models intended to embody an ideal community, presented for instance in . . . mile or in La Nouvelle Hlose, fail to fulfill their promises. One is always left with certain "privileged center" (p. 81) around which all other component elements, be they individuals or sociopolitical structures, revolve. Martel commends Rousseau's intensity, passion, and honesty, but concludes that he really offers us nothing that would represent an emancipatory advancement over Locke. Rousseau's liberal subject, just like the one constructed by Locke, is "suspended between earth and heaven, . . . dreaming of its own power" (p. 110). Rousseau understands the chains that bind (the title of Martel's book comes from one of Rousseau's plays), but unfortunately -- for him, for us, and for liberalism -- he has no means at his disposal to cut himself loose. In Chapters 3 and 4, Martel argues that American transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau, replicate in important ways the arguments and aporias already encountered by Locke and Rousseau. He discusses the affinities between Emerson and Locke and between Thoreau and Rousseau.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

Emerson's elitism and dark, religious moods entangle him in the construction of hierarchies and binaries (the genuis v. the masses, for instance), and make him unable to see the possibility of a polity that would transcend privilege and egotistical competition for resources. Neither Emerson's model of Romantic love nor his model of friendship go beyond seeing the other as "merely a stepping stone on a higher path" (p. 126). Thoreau, on the other hand, reveals a more nuanced democratic consciousness, but his theoretical options also remain circumscribed by the hierarchical doctrine of love. There is in Thoreau's love of nature a drive to tame and subjugate that which is wild and unpredictable (thus, truly other) in order to make it support the development of the self. The implicit assumption here is that what is good for the self is also good for the other, hence eliding the possibility that the emergence of such a self is premised upon the sacrifice of the other. Likewise, in Thoreau's relations with his Native American guides, one can read most of the prejudices of the 19th century urbanites, including the unambiguous privileging of urban over Native American values and modes of living. In Martel's words, Thoreau is "a 'cultivated' plant who always meant to return home" (p. 126), or who, much less innocently, imposes the values of home upon that which is different from it. 16. 17. To sum up, therefore, according to Martel, the self as constituted by liberal political theory is the self whose relation to the other is colored either by dependence or by domination (as inscribed in the doctrine of love). No egalitarian democratic community can be put together among the liberal selves. The question that remains to be tackled is whether there are any alternative solutions available. Martel claims that the alternative does exist, and he draws it out of the work of Thomas Hobbes. He emphasizes what he calls Hobbes' radical empiricism, which finds in the agency of the human body all that is necessary for obtaining adequate knowledge of the world. In other words, what humans can know does not depend on the will or love of God (whom Hobbes conceptualizes as silent), but is instead grounded in the reality of their own sensual faculties. The body becomes "the one and only operative basis of political and personal identity" (p. 201). Considering that all bodies are limited insofar as they are marked by mortality, a political space opens up in which the sense of a common fate can come into being. Not only does death eliminate all privilege, but it also makes individuals aware of the singularity of their own existence, since nobody can die in their place. This, according to Martel, allows for the possibility of a nonhierarchical polity where the respect for the separateness of selves becomes the most cherished value. However -- and this is the problem I see with Martel's argument and, by extension, with the Derridean reading of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas which figures prominently in Martel's account -- there is no reason to expect that these separate selves will in fact behave in an ethical manner toward each other. Martel admits as much when he writes that "'perhaps' in our unpredictable, unscripted, and limited time here on earth, we might just choose to be friends" (p. 215). But what if we do not do so? Will this lead to the proverbial Hobbesian anarchy, the war of all against all? Will respect disintegrate into indifference and separateness into alienation? Would we really get a polity more emancipated than the status quo? Martel does not answer these questions, and perhaps they are not possible to answer within the liberal tradition.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. Therefore, let me sketch the possibility of another alternative. I will do so as briefly as I can, considering the space limitations of a review (but I would be willing to continue the discussion of alternatives elsewhere). In my opinion, the early Marx, the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and German Ideology, offers an outline of the kind of community that Martel wants see, while avoiding the danger that this new community might be torn by ethical ambiguities. In other words, the very emergence of a new, qualitatively different community means for Marx that ethical dilemmas of this kind have been sublated (aufgehoben). Marx writes: . . . [socialism] is positive human self-consciousness, no longer a self-consciousness mediated through a negation of religion [atheism]; just as the real life of man is the positive reality of man no longer mediated through the negation of private property, through communism."[1] In other words, individuals in a socialist society as imagined by Marx would relate to each other in a way that we can be sure would respect the unrepeatable uniqueness of each ("the positive human self-consciousness"). They would love each other with a love that rejects hierarchy and mediation, enjoying the benefits of what Marx calls "the real life," that is, a mode of life that supports the actualization of one's human (both individual and collective) potential (the famous species-being).[2] In addition, it seems to me that the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse goes even further than Marx in defining the structural components of a non-hierarchical society. He emphasizes the role played by the liberation of sexual drives in the formation of an aesthetic, loving attitude toward other individuals and the world. In the routinized labor processes of a liberal capitalist civilization, sexual drives are invested into performing well and getting the job done, while the human body is "desexualized." [3] The repression of sexuality results in the build-up of negative emotions, of anger, hostility, aggression. For this reason, demands for sexual liberation and enjoyment can act as catalysts that mobilize a universal political revolt against the commands of the super-egoistic (sic!) status quo. After all, the human body, which -- I agree with Martel -- should be conceptualized as the sole depository of identity, is as marked by sexuality as it is by mortality. Hence, once freed from repression and repressive (commercialized) desublimation, sexualized bodily practices could become a basis for the development of a society where love is not a chain, that is, precisely the kind of egalitarian society that Martel speaks of as elusive and always beyond the reach.

24. 25.

26. 27.