Philosophy
Western philosophy slowly pushed love to the margins, treating it as a problem to solve, a temptation to tame, or a fantasy to distrust. Yet thinkers from Foucault to Žižek reopen the question, showing love as practice, power, rupture, and the one force that exposes who we are with others.
The Great Retreat: How Philosophy Abandoned the Body
After Plato, Western philosophy’s engagement with love becomes increasingly abstract or suspicious. Several factors drove this abandonment:
The Platonist Split Hardens: The division between eternal Forms and temporal particulars, between soul and body, calcifies in later Platonism and Christian theology. Augustine struggles with his sexuality, ultimately subordinating eros to agape, divine love that gives without desire, that loves universally rather than particularly. Human sexual love becomes at best a shadow of divine love, at worst a distraction from it.
Medieval scholastics have elaborate theories of divine love but deep suspicion of human romantic and sexual love. The body becomes a prison for the soul, desire becomes temptation, and particular attachments become idolatry. One is supposed to love God infinitely, and one’s neighbour equally. But preferential love, choosing this person over others, gets coded as fallen and selfish.
The Cartesian Subject: Descartes establishes the cogito, “I think, therefore I am”, as philosophy’s foundation. The subject becomes isolated, self-certain, and defined by rational thought rather than relation. Love, which fundamentally involves another person, becomes secondary to the thinking self’s internal certainty. This creates a problem: if I am fundamentally a thinking thing, and I know myself most certainly when I withdraw from the world into pure thought, then other people become epistemologically problematic. How do I know other minds exist? Love requires assuming the other exists, matters and makes demands on me. But in Cartesian epistemology, I start with myself and have to “prove” that others exist. Love gets the order backwards! It begins with being already entangled with another.
Kantian Ethics and the Suspicion of Inclination: Kant builds ethics around reason alone. A moral action must be done from duty to universal law, not from inclination, desire, or feeling. Love is inclination par excellence. One doesn’t love humanity in general (though Kant wants us to respect it), one loves a particular person. But for Kant, that particularity is precisely what makes love morally suspect. One might love one’s child and thus feed them. But that is not moral action for Kant, because one is not acting from duty to universal law; one is acting from personal attachment. True moral action would be feeding the child because it’s our duty to any rational being, not because we love them specifically. This seems perverse: surely loving one’s own child and feeding them is both morally good and arises from love? But Kantian ethics cannot accommodate this sufficiently.
Utilitarian Calculation: Bentham and Mill focus on maximising pleasure and minimising pain across all sentient beings. Love might produce pleasure, but it is not itself philosophically interesting; what matters is the pleasure produced, not the relationship that produces it. Moreover, strong attachments to particular people (family, lovers, friends) might interfere with impartial utility calculation. If I love my partner, I might save them rather than five strangers, but this violates utilitarian logic. Love’s partiality becomes a problem to overcome, not a phenomenon to understand.
Liberal Political Philosophy: Locke, Rawls, and social contract theorists imagine society as composed of rational individuals who agree to rules for mutual benefit. But this atomistic picture (separate individuals who then contract together) cannot explain or account for love.
We are never as separate as liberal theory requires. We are born into relationships of dependence and care. We form bonds not through rational contract but through affection, habit, and shared history. Love suggests we are fundamentally social, not separately rational individuals who then choose to connect.
Foucault’s Love as Technology of the Self: Michel Foucault never wrote a systematic philosophy of love, but his late work on sexuality and “care of the self” opens unexpected terrain. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault shows how modern power does not just repress desire: it produces it, categorises it, and makes us confess it. We are taught to think our sexuality and our loves reveal our “true self,” but this very idea is historically produced. The ancient Greeks and Romans, Foucault argues, had a different relationship to eros. They practised “care of the self” (epimeleia heautou), that is, cultivation of one’s relationship to pleasure, desire, and others. Love wasn’t about discovering your authentic identity but about creating yourself through how you loved. The question was not “what does my desire reveal about who I really am?” but “what kind of person do I become through how I conduct my many loves?”
This matters for thinking transgressive love. When society polices who can love whom, it is not just enforcing social boundaries; it is enforcing a particular understanding of the self. The idea that you “are” (usually in binaries of heterosexual or homosexual), that your love reveals your essential nature, is modern. Earlier frameworks allowed more fluidity: you loved this person and performed these practices without these acts defining your core identity. Foucault suggests we might reclaim this: love as practice, as self-fashioning, rather than as revelation of fixed essence.
Žižek’s Love as the Real That Breaks Through: Slavoj Žižek, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, offers something radical: love as encounter with the Real, the traumatic thing that shatters our symbolic reality. We construct fantasy scenarios about love, romantic narratives, idealised beloveds, and scripts for how love should go. Then we actually fall in love, and the real person exceeds, disturbs and does not fit the fantasy. For Žižek, authentic love happens when you love not the idealised image but the person in their incompleteness, their failure to live up to the fantasy. You love the beloved not despite but because of their imperfections, the ways they fall short of your ideal. This is why love is so difficult, so rare. Most “love” is narcissism, loving your own fantasy reflected.
This connects to boundary-crossing love. When someone loves across religious or caste lines, families often say: “You don’t really love them, you love a fantasy, you’re naive about who they really are.” But Žižek suggests the opposite might be true. Fantasy-love is safe, stays within approved categories. Real love, love that encounters the Other as genuinely other (not reduced to familiar categories), is precisely what crosses boundaries. When you love someone society tells you not to, you are forced to encounter them outside comforting fantasies. Žižek argues that love is inherently excessive and transgressive. It does not respect proper boundaries because it breaks through the symbolic order entirely. This is why every social order fears love, not because love is irrational, but because it’s too honest, too direct an encounter with another person outside the mediating categories society provides.