Is it Love?

Jan Verwoert has often adapted this to the best definition of art I’ve ever come across.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 →

Is there on the contrary a logic that subtracts mutually? See Envy, Extreme jealousy, Evil Eye, Evil, Misery, Satan.

See Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “The Future After the End of Economy,” e-flux journal 30 (December 2011) →

Thanks to Evgeny Shkaraburov for informing me of this after a jog.

See the report published by the New England Journal of Medicine on the increase in cases of sudden cardiac arrest following long-distance running races in the US between 2000 and 2010: →

Confucianism in China is probably the best example of how family love can function as an organizing principle strong enough to sustain society without central command or mediation by state bodies. Because Confucianism in a nutshell implements a command structure within the private space of family relations, the social order is doubly protected from instabilities outside by basic solidarities backed by blood, love, and seniority. On this level Confucianism is essentially a moral code based in absolute unwavering obedience to one’s own family elders, and to one’s self by juniors in the family. And while many cite Confucianism as the popular belief system that sustained Chinese civilization for millennia in spite of wars and regime changes, its stabilizing effects come at the expense of social inequities between various clans and families, between women and men, between young and old. Confucianism is not egalitarian and does not aim to be. Powerful families stay strong, and the weak families stay weak.

The universal cosmic love declared by nineteenth century utopians like Charles Fourier was always an attempt to formulate how love could be socialized, transitioned from the sphere of family and sensual attraction to an ethical, universal human responsibility between people. And the more bizarre and extreme aspects of Fourier’s thinking, which was in his time attributed to his personal eccentricity as a person, should also be understood as a tacit recognition of how difficult and projective and even phantasmagorical the idea of universal love always must be, and the idea of equality by extension.