Description
What is love? And how does it make worlds? This paper seeks to contribute to a normative history of love’s implication in worldmaking told from the peripheries of the ‘West’. Noting love’s meaning is a neglected site of normative contestation, love is foregrounded as an important but ignored global phenomena that is implicated in the worldmaking work of animating and sustaining ecologies of peace and political violence. Uncovering love’s role in the transition from an inter-imperial to an inter-national order, the paper posits that love enlivens the contested logics of intervention, revolution, and endless war, then and now. In so doing it connects commonplace understandings of love to conceptions of power, community, and legitimacy, and offers a fresh reading of global literary figures like Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Albert Camus as theorists of love’s worldmaking work.
