srećko horvat, the radicality of love — review
in the radicality of love, horvat has a hard time trying to figure out how to separate love from his desire to make it something else
horvat can only think through the main characters of the show: lenin, che guevara, rudi dutschke, rather than the actual participators or peasants/victims of the ideologies he analyzes in russia and iran that interfere with love metaphysically. every example he comes up with pushes him away from love and towards visibility, where by trying to define love as the opposite of visibility, he hardly ever manages to create the conditions of a historical analysis of love other than the brief intro. his love ends up being a romantic-metaphysical defense of meaningful encounter scaffolded through a revolutionary language, with the auspices of a pointless revolutionary aesthetic.
or better said, he ends up talking about the ways in which ideology interferes with energy and libido, rather than "what it takes to love inside of ideology", his intended idea, which he only investigates in the last chapter through kommune 1, and only more specifically, whenever he feels the need to slam any type of love cultivated under those conditions, which for him does not meet the acceptable conditions of radicality.
when horvat talks about the discovery of a personal love, he speaks all the same of the glorificiation of the mistreatment of ideology towards this "possibility of love", or in rimbaud's case, the nuclear family in which he remained unhappy. horvat writes: “he himself was dreaming about crusades, unrecorded voyages of discovery, moral revolutions, and enchantment. and he even reached it in his short and wild affair – accompanied by lots of heavy drinking, absinthe and hashish – with verlaine.” much the same, later on in the work he'll launder this idea once again through a canonical figure: "“take lenin. wasn’t he, during his prerevolutionary period… a skilled hunter in siberia, chess player, hiker in the alps, cyclist in the cities of western europe? isn’t this ‘non-geometric lenin’ the true radicality of lenin as such?” and what exactly is horvat's point in all of this? “the revolutionary aim at changing everyday life was perverted into the postmodern variety of lifestyles: it is not subversive anymore… neither to be gay or a transvestite, nor to have regular sex with two people at the same time or ten.”
it is immediately clear that horvat cannot possibly be talking about love itself, or even about ideology as an encounter to love. the context is: he is saying this in response to a gay beach encounter that he denied, a moment for him to become rimbaud, if only he would have taken the swim he was offered by the random suggestive snorkler. he even says it himself "who knows, maybe he was not interested in having fun with another guy: he actually wanted to talk about his ideas on revolution, and i was the one who took it only as a call for sex." is horvat, rhetorically speaking, angry at the concept of love due to the fact that it's not subversive enough for him to imagine the possibility of having sex with a transgender person anymore in a way that matters, the image of a fetish he could cultivate in his own mind about the idea? or is the snorkler at fault for not beginning his discussion with horvat in the form of a rosa luxembourg speech?
naturally, you may imagine that in horvat's perfect commune, instead of cameras and playboy covers, you can only have sex in a revolutionary manner inside of a commune if everyone is actively chanting rudi dutschke's name. for love, it's between this and "fuck buddies", there is no middle line anymore. or rather, for horvat, it's about how ideology can speak about energy. the lack of an ideology instrumentalizes love, the overabundance of ideology functionalizes love, the middle line of ideology and the explorer complex leads you to abandoning your own kids, marriage and identity. horvat is stuck in a trap, he can only analyze love if it's visible, he can only dream about love if it "seems" subversive to him, he can only have a quasi-romantic encounter with a snorkler if he recognizes horvat and says "hey, wasn't m.i.a at one of your events?"
in many ways, horvat is right. lenin was a bourgeoise european skater before he started dreaming of chopping everyone's heads off and relinquishing his own libido through falling in depression over classical music. rimbaud never did want to be a poet, he needed to sell dangerous arms in african countries for his own basic sense of well-being. che guevara, much like theweleit's analysis in "male fantasies" clearly fantasizes about abandoning his own kids more than he fantasizes about the actual war he's about to start ("revolutionary uprising", blegh) , which is only secondary to that abandonment. but, let's not kid ourselves, horvat here is not talking about "love", which cannot be a replacement term for a counter-ideological defense against every form of non-managed, over-compulsive libidinal break.
rather, love clearly moulds around the metaphysical standpoints of a given ideology, and energy expenditure becomes a part of that bargain, a bargain that horvat clearly himself analyzes in his chapter on libidinality, where he continues to balance or rather retrospect discipline vs spontineity: "when the “non-geometric lenin” turns into “the geometric lenin” dangers appear. not when the libidinal energy invested into hiking or cycling threatens the revolution, so that it has – together with sexual energy or love – to be suppressed, but conversely: when the revolution threatens to swallow this very spontaneity."
this very chapter covers those same topics of libidinality, from reich claiming that the revolution should release sexuality because economic liberation naturally produces a sexual revolution, and being dissapointed to find out russia reinstated bourgeoise sexuality once again, to zalkind saying sexuality must be restrained because it wastes energy needed for socialist construction, and to naiman showing how this sexual restraint starts to encounter public ideology through trials and moral pedagogies and become a public matter. horvat himself notes: “the main complaint against sexuality is that it represents too much expenditure of energy, which prevents the individual from contributing to society.”
horvat's analysis of lenin's ideological closure of love culminates in his sorrow over the death of his deceased love and his complicated relationship with classical music, but best scored by this quote: "“one of lenin’s comrades, animated by a zeal that even his leader judged excessive, claimed it was forbidden: you start by liking flowers and before you know it you are seized by the desire to live like a landowner lazily stretched out in a hammock who reads French novels and is waited on by obsequious valets in the midst of his magnificent garden.”. a lot of the reasons for these libidinal debates can be seen in orlando figes' a people's tragedy, where this same philosophy becomes just as explicit, and in many ways confirms horvat's reading: "the most heroic of these positive heroes was rakhmetev in chernyshevsky’s dreadful novel what is to be done? (1862). this monolithic titan, who was to serve as a model for a whole generation of revolutionaries, including lenin, renounces all the pleasures of life in order to harden his superhuman will and make himself insensible to the human suffering which the coming revolution is bound to create."
yet, horvat fails his own analysis of libido just the same, precisely because he's so focused on trying to fuze the perfect little concept of love, one that for him resembles the yugoslavian ideal, the great hero warrior, an amazing free lover, but not one captured by ideology, who can also at times escape without leaving a trace, who, like in barthes, can turn love into an ideology equally as metaphysically totalizing as communism itself. “the hipster subculture is the perfect embodiment of this co-optation: it is the pure hedonistic aestheticization of everyday life without any subversive potential whatsoever.” horvat refuses to see whats in front of him, that the pure hedonistic aestheticization is a form of the subversion of the energy expenditure philosophy left as a remnant of a political order.
horvat's own views reflect denis de rougemont's famous work, love in the western world, which argues that romantic love is not a globally possible experience but a historically specific invention rooted in troubadour poetry and the cathar heresy, roughly 11th-13th century occitania, with the idea being that romantic passion is structurally dependent on obstacles such as secrecy, suffeirng, and ultimately for that time period death itself even. yet, horvat's libidinal shortcomings fail to recognize the way ideology moulds desire, and he jumps right on the wagon: “what grindr’s design encourages are rapid transactions between its users to help speed up the discovery of matches. but isn’t the point of falling in love precisely the waiting for responses… the careful crafting of messages, the coordination to meet…”
the irony is that he analyzes visibility as the destruction of this desire, but later in chapter 5 attacks the ideology of visibility for failing the criteria he himself set, when he analyzes the failures of kommune 1's spectacularization: “the main purpose of the commune is the ‘aufhebung’ of all ‘bourgeois dependency relationships…’ and the ‘destruction of the private sphere and all our performed normalities.’”, and horvat paraphrases again: “it was the victim of its own ideology.”, and again: “langhans says they should use the capitalist motto ‘sex sells’ for their own struggle.”, and finally: “for behind this exhibitionism hides a helplessness, fear and horror.”
his expectation that kommune 1 was supposed to be subversive ends with the sudden realization of the commune that visibility and media performance is more powerful than their own idea to overturn sexuality, an impulse that basically every single modern ideological philosophy has followed, nearly to the point of the brandification of the daily commons as can be seen today. srecko notes: “when uschi obermeier first came to the commune… the communards gave her the books of mao and marx as a sort of initiation… but she thought the words were ‘too unattractive.’ it is a supreme irony that uschi obermeier was first seen as an intruder and outsider, but it was she who made kommune 1 so popular.”
his conclusion looks something like this: “the revolutionary aim at changing everyday life was perverted into the postmodern variety of lifestyles.” and this “on the other hand, it was this very ‘subversion’ that was later co-opted by the establishment and turned into a commodity.” yet, what is so co-optive about a supposed "subversion" of a commune that only shortly after its start ends up being a media machine, located in the exact intersection of culture that would have prevented it from ever being a valid example? what about the twin oaks commune, which was founded in the exact same year as kommune 1, 1967, with the only difference being that it was a labour experiment that continued to be durable, egalitarian, income-sharing and rural? why, instead of that, does horvat choose to analyze the tortorous suffering of holger meins in a german white room, other than that he "happened to be associated with uschi around this time?"
is it not precisely because of the fact that horvat can only analyze libido when the body is transformed, when the image of subversive ideals or intentions crosses or overcomes the image of subversive experiences, when the subversivity of experience itself is not visible to horvat? but in fact, there seems to even be something more. horvat is caught in an undecided bind between whether love is supposed to have stakes and abandon ideology, or whether love can only pass through ideology without the stakes that ideology itself would naturally bind it to. horvat ends up on a compromise that kills the weight of his idea, the same yugoslavian heroic ideal discovered in earlier through rimbaud: “if anything, it is obvious that this deadlock can not be resolved by choosing one way or the other, but by combining them… maybe it is possible to be a husband, lover, poet and revolutionary at the same time.” ending with the cliche: “the solution is not love or revolution, but love and revolution.”
so what does twin oaks, an actual egalitarian commune and not a media spectacle, reveal about ideology's relationship to love that kommune 1 was too busy prostituting itself to the media to reveal, and horvat was too focused on to analyze actual ideological implication? well, hear it from kat kinkade, a member of the commune: "no, we didn't conquer jealousy in 1970, or 1975 or 1985 either, and 1995 isn't going to be any different, as far as i can see. all efforts along those lines were failures ... twin oaks drops all its communistic idealism in this matter. we compete with each other for mates, and few acknowledge any rules in the competition. people do what they can for themselves, and government keeps its hands off. in this, at least, we behave like the rest of the world."
what it reveals about love is that ideology can conquer almost everything except for it, and except for personal interests, meaning that, it's precisely love that remains a libidinal disposal mechanism rather than a part of the "love and revolution" that horvat so disasterously wants. he wants it to be non-subversive, long and journeyous, personally revealing, non-complicit wiht regimes, but simultaneously involved in some type of social-collective pursuit. when in reality, one of the most successful communes in history reveals the opposite: that there is an element of the commune where supposedly outside of the one hour credit system, the free housing and health, and the fifty dollars monthly check for personal use, nobody wants to reveal whether they get checks from relatives abroad, or whether they are interested in partners, jealous of them, or personally complicit in economies of intimacy.
and this is the problem of energy management that guevara and lenin reveal - libido and sexual interest themselves cannot be collectivized - but they can still remain a part of an ideological script. this reveals, contrary to horvat, that energy expenditure is dynamic when it comes to ideological subsidation, but entirely rigid when it comes to ideological overcoming. ideology can replace desire, libidinal discharge, excitement and so on, and it can mould the forms of social organization implied by the libido (as in tinder, playboy, kommune 1), but cannot in any real way prevent the way in which the libido flows, manifests itself, or actually organizes itself in space, if not only to repress or deincentivize it, especially when in a vacuum, when in a place where the usual mechanisms that sustain monogamy outside geographical distance, separate professional lives, the management of information and affairs between partners suddenly don't exist.