In Praise Of Love

When was the last time you took a real risk for love? Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love begins with this provocative question, though not in those exact words. For Badiou, love isn’t just a private feeling between two people—it is a radical, almost political act that resists the comfort-seeking world we inhabit. In conversation with journalist Nicolas Truong, the French philosopher argues that love, in its truest form, is an adventure in becoming Two, a shared construction of truth forged in risk, chance, and commitment. Love, he contends, is one of the rare domains where truth emerges not from abstract reasoning or scientific method but from lived experience of difference.

At its heart, In Praise of Love is both a defense and a reinvention. Badiou believes love is under attack—from consumerism, technology, and the obsession with safety that pervades modern life. In an age of dating apps promising “love without risk” or “perfect matches,” the philosopher declares: love must be defended from the culture that markets it as a risk-free commodity. For him, love is about risk, duration, and truth—a process of constructing a shared world that transcends self-interest.

Love as a Site of Resistance

As Badiou explains, love cannot be insured like a car or health plan. In today’s neoliberal culture—where everything is subject to management, regulation, and control—love’s unpredictability makes it suspect. Companies like Meetic (a French dating website) even advertise “love without chance,” echoing the logic of zero-risk warfare or “smart bombs.” Behind the satire, Badiou sees a deeper problem: we are replacing the adventure of love with safety, control, and consumer convenience. To reject this, he insists, is a political act—a small defiance against the capitalist order that seeks to eliminate risk from all human relations.

Love as One of Philosophy’s Four Conditions

In his broader body of work, Badiou identifies four “conditions” for philosophy—science, politics, art, and love. Each provides a unique way for humans to encounter truth. Science reveals truths about matter, politics about collective equality, art about beauty, and love about difference. Love, in particular, offers access to truth through human experience: it enables you to see the world not from your own solitary perspective but through the shared gaze of Two. “What is the world like,” he asks, “when it is experienced from the point of view of difference and not identity?” This question shapes the whole book.

From Encounter to Construction

For Badiou, love begins with an event—a contingent, unpredictable encounter that cannot be planned or managed. Yet this encounter means little without what follows: the long, difficult work of construction, what he calls the creation of the “Two Scene.” Love must move from the miracle of the first meeting to the endurance of everyday life. The task is to build a world, step by step, through the balance of difference and unity. In this sense, love isn’t a static feeling but a process of truth, similar to a scientific experiment or political movement—it evolves, tests, and transforms those who engage in it.

Love as a Truth Procedure

Badiou borrows from his metaphysical language to call love a “truth procedure”—a way truth enters the world. This truth is not rational or objective but existential: it arises when two individuals persist in the shared construction of life. The declaration “I love you” marks the shift from pure chance to a commitment that gives meaning to time. As Badiou explains using André Gorz’s moving letter to his wife Dorine, fidelity—understood not as monogamy but as the creative endurance of love—transforms chance into destiny. In love, time itself bends: eternity enters the temporal through the persistence of fidelity. Love, then, is a disciplined victory over randomness and despair.

The Intersections of Love, Politics, and Art

Badiou insists love shares a deep kinship with politics and art. Like politics, love is tested by differences and conflicts, yet unlike politics, it contains no enemies—only internal dramas and reconciliations. Love and art both turn life’s random moments into events of creation. Through literature, theatre, and surrealism (as with André Breton’s l’amour fou), Badiou sees examples of how art captures the truth of love: the eruption of meaning through encounter. In this, love becomes both human and cosmic—a rebellion against isolation, mirroring the solidarity found in political movements.

Why Love Matters Now

For readers today, Badiou’s message is urgent. We live in a world that privatizes feeling, commodifies connection, and sterilizes experience. Love, once celebrated as a spiritual risk, is increasingly managed by algorithms. In Praise of Love invites you to resist this trend by reclaiming love as both adventure and work: a commitment to difference, a builder of worlds, and a truth worth suffering for. To love, in Badiou’s view, is to believe—against despair and cynicism—that the world can still be seen anew through another’s eyes.

Badiou begins his defense of love by acknowledging the many ways it is under siege in modern life. Publicity, consumerism, and technological mediation all conspire to render love harmless—predictable, insured, and risk-free. For him, these forces don’t simply distort love; they aim to *neutralize* its radical power.

Love Without Chance: A Culture of Safety

Badiou famously mocks the marketing campaign of Meetic, a French dating platform whose slogan reads, “Get love without chance!” The very slogan, he argues, turns love into a management problem. It promises to eliminate danger, suffering, and unpredictability—as though love could be guaranteed by carefully selected filters and algorithms. This obsession with control reflects a broader social pathology: we want pleasure without passion, intimacy without vulnerability. We dream of “zero-risk love” just as we dream of “zero-casualty wars” (a comparison he draws to Western military propaganda).

For Badiou, this ideology of safety is more insidious than traditional arranged marriages. Where the old system sacrificed choice to family hierarchy, the modern one sacrifices chance to the illusion of personal control. Both, however, are anti-poetic—they eliminate randomness and stifle the existential risk that gives life its intensity.

Hedonism and the Denial of Depth

The second threat to love is not fear but superficiality. In our hedonistic age, love is reduced to one option among many for gratification. The focus shifts from building a world with another to maximizing sensual enjoyment. As sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Sennett have noted, this mirrors the logic of finance capitalism—relationships become liquid, flexible, disposable. “No commitment love” reflects “no contract labor.” In both domains, we trade stability for comfort, depth for freedom, meaning for convenience.

Reinventing Risk and Adventure

Against these twin enemies—safety and superficiality—Badiou calls for a return to love as adventure. Borrowing from Rimbaud’s injunction that “love must be re-invented,” he argues that this reinvention should not be nostalgic. We can’t simply defend “traditional love” but must create new forms of risk and fidelity appropriate to our times. The task, he says, is “to re-invent risk and adventure against safety and comfort.” Only by doing so can love reclaim its philosophical and moral significance.

Key Insight

For Badiou, love’s enemies are not jealousy or infidelity but the political forces that domesticate it—market logic, consumerist freedom, and a fear of the unpredictable.

Thus, love stands as one of the last bastions of authentic experience in a commodified world. Every true act of love becomes, in Badiou’s vision, an act of resistance—a small revolution against the culture of comfort and control.

Badiou argues that Western philosophy has always had a troubled relationship with love. On the one hand, philosophers like Plato placed it near the center of truth; on the other, thinkers from Schopenhauer to the moralists regarded it as deceptive or dangerous. In In Praise of Love, he maps three traditional interpretations—romantic, contractual, and sceptical—and then proposes his own: love as a process of truth grounded in difference.

From Plato to Kierkegaard

Plato, Badiou notes, saw in love an impulse toward universality—the movement from the particular beauty of one person to the Idea of Beauty itself. This is the philosophical root of Badiou’s claim that love has universal significance. Kierkegaard, by contrast, treated love as a personal calling: an ethical and, ultimately, religious commitment. Between Plato’s metaphysics and Kierkegaard’s faith lies a tension that still haunts thinkers today—whether love is divine revelation or worldly event.

Lacan and the Absence of a Sexual Relationship

Badiou also reinterprets Jacques Lacan’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” For Lacan, sex separates rather than unites; pleasure isolates us in narcissism. Love, then, becomes what fills the void left by the nonexistence of the sexual relationship. It allows us to encounter the being of the other, rather than their body or fantasy. Badiou appreciates this insight but expands it: love is not just an illusion masking desire, but a project to build truth from difference. The “Two Scene” is not fusion but coexistence—two perspectives encountering the world together.

Beyond Ethics and Theology

Badiou distances himself from Emmanuel Levinas’s theology of alterity, which elevates the experience of the Other to divine status. Levinas makes love ethical, even sacred. But Badiou argues that love is not ethical but existential—it builds a world, not a moral lesson. “Love doesn’t take me Above or Below,” he writes, “it is an existential project.” Love’s truth is not in self-sacrifice but in the joint creation of meaning out of difference.

In everyday terms, when you sit beside someone you love and see the same landscape, you and your lover are no longer just two separate beings—you are co-creators of a world that exists only through your shared gaze. This, Badiou says, is the truth of love: it is “the birth of the world.”

According to Badiou, love begins as an unpredictable encounter, but it only finds its full meaning in what follows: the construction of a shared life. The encounter is like lightning—it reveals a possibility—but what matters is the decision to pursue that revelation through the long process of living and building together. This is what he calls the Two Scene: the ongoing negotiation of difference that creates something new.

The Event and its Aftermath

Every love story begins with chance—a meeting that could easily not have happened. Badiou calls this the event, a rupture in ordinary life. It may occur between members of opposing worlds (as in Romeo and Juliet) or simply between two lonely commuters. In that instant, reality opens up and offers a new beginning. But the event alone does not define love; what follows does. The miracle of meeting becomes meaningful only if it is anchored by fidelity: the ongoing commitment to what that encounter promised.

Against Romantic Fusion

Badiou critiques the Romantic ideal that equates love with total union or “meltdown.” In works like Tristan and Isolde, love’s ecstasy culminates in death—the ultimate fusion of Two into One. But this, he argues, is existentially false. True love does not dissolve individuality; it works to construct a world that sustains the duality. The fusion of Romanticism is art’s myth, not life’s truth. Real love, by contrast, is stubborn, tedious, and courageous—the “tenacious adventure” that endures despite disagreement and change.

Desire, Friendship, and the Body

Badiou pushes back against the French moralist tradition that regards love as a disguise for sexual desire. Love, he insists, is not merely an ideological cover for biology. Sexual union, when embedded in love, is the physical expression of a greater truth—the surrender to the world of Two. Friendship, by contrast, lacks this bodily proof. In this way, the shared body becomes both symbol and tool of love’s construction: the site where difference is experienced, communicated, and affirmed.

Thus, love is not something you fall into; it is something you build. It is, as Badiou might say, the art of enduring the difference that chance has given you, over time, against the tide of comfort and conformity.

When Badiou calls love a “truth procedure,” he means that love generates knowledge about the world—specifically, knowledge of what it means to perceive life from the perspective of Two rather than One. Love, then, is not contrary to truth but a unique method for discovering it.

From Chance to Destiny

The central drama of love is the transformation of chance into destiny. You meet by accident, but through a declaration—“I love you”—you turn the random encounter into a commitment. The declaration is pivotal: it curbs chance and initiates construction. Like language in poetry, the statement “I love you” wields immense power—it creates reality. Badiou compares this to Mallarmé’s phrase, “Chance is at last curbed.” Fidelity, in this schema, is not mere loyalty but the ongoing triumph of chance through time. It is love’s way of creating eternity within the finite span of human life.

Eternity in Time

When lovers say “always,” they are engaging in a metaphysical gamble. They attempt to carve out eternity inside time’s flow. For Badiou, this isn’t delusion—it’s the very essence of love’s truth. Love is where time and eternity meet, where the ephemeral becomes absolute through fidelity. In this way, love mirrors the joy of revolution, the beauty of art, or the clarity of science: each offers a taste of permanence born from transient conditions.

The Child as a Point of Renewal

Badiou discusses how children can serve as “points” in the process of love—moments demanding a renewed declaration. A birth reshapes the Two Scene, forcing the couple to reconstruct their love around a new presence. This doesn’t reduce love to reproduction but shows how its truth is repeatedly re-tested in life’s unfolding events.

For Badiou, then, the truth of love lies not in ideals but in practice—in the enduring, creative labor of transforming randomness into necessity.

Badiou draws a bold parallel between love and politics. Both are truth procedures, both involve fidelity to an event, and both resist structures of domination. But while love operates in the world of Two, politics operates in the world of the collective. Together, they reveal humanity’s capacity to exceed itself.

Politics as Collective Truth

Politics, for Badiou, tests what the collective can achieve: equality, solidarity, universality. Love, by contrast, tests how difference can be creative rather than divisive. Each has its own challenges: in politics, the main obstacle is the state; in love, it is selfishness. The family, Badiou notes, is to love what the state is to politics—an apparatus that tames and domesticates what began as a radical encounter.

Enemies and Dramas

Another key distinction: politics defines itself through enemies; love does not. In love, the only real adversary is yourself—your tendency to return to identity, to resist difference. Love’s crises arise from within, while politics’ conflicts are external. Both, however, share a structure of trials, fidelities, and renewals. Love’s jealousies mirror political betrayals, but in both, Badiou insists, redemption lies in re-affirmation, not control.

Communism, Fraternity, and Passion

Though Badiou rejects sentimental notions of “a politics of love,” he sees parallels between love’s openness to difference and communism’s vision of equality. Just as love accepts Otherness, communism seeks to integrate social and cultural difference into a shared world. The two are linked by their potential to transcend the logic of possession and identity. Love, in this philosophical sense, becomes a microcosm of universal fraternity—a “minimal communism” of two.

Thus, the political dimension of In Praise of Love invites you to view your relationships not as escapes from the world but as its reinvention—on a small, human scale.

In art, as in love, truth appears suddenly and intensely. Badiou deepens this by connecting love to Surrealism, poetry, and theatre—domains that, like love, reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary.

Surrealism’s Mad Love

For André Breton and the Surrealists, love was revolutionary—l’amour fou (mad love)—a force that defies all order. It is spontaneous and lawless, a poetic eruption of truth. Badiou admires this but finds it incomplete. The Surrealists captured the miracle of the encounter but ignored the work of endurance. Their love ends at the moment of discovery; his begins there. True love, he argues, is not a fleeting miracle but a labor of duration—a “construction of eternity within time.”

Beckett and the Tenacity of Love

Surprisingly, Badiou finds a model of enduring love not in Romanticism but in Samuel Beckett. In plays like Happy Days and stories like Enough, Beckett portrays aged couples persevering amid decay. Their love is stripped of glamour yet filled with tenderness. For Badiou, this “obstinacy of love” captures the truth more powerfully than any ecstatic union—it shows love as survival, presence, and shared endurance against time.

Theatre as Embodied Thought

As a playwright and actor himself, Badiou sees theatre as a metaphor for love: both unite thought and body, idea and presence. In theatre, as in love, you rehearse, fail, and try again—each encounter is a “scene” where meaning and emotion fuse. The actor’s vulnerability mirrors the lover’s declaration: both risk exposure for the sake of truth. Thus, art doesn’t imitate love; it is love’s sister form of truth—a disciplined passion captured through language and gesture.

By tying art, politics, and love together, Badiou reclaims love from sentimentality and raises it to philosophy’s highest stage: as the theatre in which human truth is played out, moment by moment, with passion and fidelity.

In the book’s conclusion, Badiou makes his argument explicit: in an age of reaction and market domination, love is a form of resistance. It defies the political and economic logic that privileges identity and self-interest. “Love what you will never see twice,” he wrote decades earlier, and this line crystallizes his philosophy: love is the courage to engage with the transient, the foreign, and the irreducibly other.

Love Versus Identity Politics

In times when political discourse retreats into questions of national belonging and cultural identity, Badiou sees love as an antidote. Love unites across difference and makes otherness desirable. If reactionary politics seeks purity and sameness—embodied in the slogans of national defense—love celebrates risk, mixture, and transformation. To defend love thus becomes to defend openness and universality.

The Visibility of Love

Badiou even reads celebrity romances as evidence, however corrupted, of humanity’s fascination with love’s intensity. Political figures like Sarkozy become fodder for tabloid melodrama not because the stories matter politically but because love, even distorted by media, remains a universal language of vulnerability. When kings and presidents suffer heartbreak, they become human again. Love, Badiou suggests, democratizes power: it reminds us that no one, however mighty, is immune to need.

Ultimately, Badiou invites you to see love as both personal and planetary—a daily act that reaffirms belief in difference, risk, and transformation. In a culture obsessed with comfort and sameness, his message lands like a call-to-arms: To love is to resist.