Palmer1984 writes with a question:

I’ve found your posts on feminism and sex, and the arguments between yourself, and Anodynelite extremely fascinating, and I wanted to ask a question.

Do you consider sex with romantic love to be preferable to the kind of “individualistic” sex that Anodynelite promotes, or do you advocate love without sex? Or are you just exploring ideas here and not advocating anything.

The first thing I would want to say is that “romantic love” is not particularly part of the agenda here. What Badiou means by “love” is not the enactment of a script or the instantiation of a stereotype, but a process that cuts transversally across sexual personae and the individual subjectivities they mask. It’s neither the fusion of two persons into a single body, nor a subject’s fixation upon an object of desire. Badiou calls it “an investigation into the world from the point of the Two”, a procedure which derives the worldly consequences of the disjunction of two sexuated subjective positions. Sexuality is part of the matter of this investigation; it is only on the basis of some such procedure that any determination of what “kind of sex” is “preferable” can have any force beyond that of a statement of a personal inclination or evaluation (“I prefer redheads”, say, or “I give this vibrator 7.5 out of 10”).

There is not anything obviously special about heterosexual serially-monogamous coupledom with respect to this schema of amorous thought, whether it entrains the conventional narrative of romantic pursuit, capture and licensed sexual enjoyment or not. The point of interest in Badiou’s account of love is not that it emphasises personal devotion, commitment or exclusivity over the casual gregariousness of sex undertaken as recreation (or as a way of rubbing along with people), but that it removes the focus from the individual person altogether, treating their desires, whims, subjective kinks and social ambitions as the indifferent substance - neither more nor less important than the stars in the heavens, or the price of fish - out of which a new generic multiple is to be woven. As such, it’s no more particularly affirming of the co-dependent in his castle than it is of the libertine at his gate.

Lyotard says somewhere that the discursive regime of capitalism is one in which the model statement is “I will give you this if you will give me that”. The commodification of sexuality is its formatting into a series of “this”es and “that”s amenible to exchange under this regime. The individualistic sexual ethic of reciprocal gratification boils down to this kind of quid pro quo. It has no intrinsic problem with the exchange of sex for money, food, healthcare, social recognition, or anything much else. It tends, in a sort of perverse redoubling, to end up eroticising exchange itself (no doubt there’s an analogy to be drawn with financialisation). The theory is that under this regime of commodification, all possible sexual goods become available in principle to anyone with the purchasing power to obtain them - you supposedly get a kind of pornotopia, brought about by the unstoppable deterritorialising power of capitalism’s abstract machine. A rising tide that floats all boats. Provided, that is, that what floats your boat is selling your ass for medicine.

What I take from Badiou here is simply the insistance that there exists something besides bodies and languages, sex acts and the contractual terms under which they are performed. There are also truths - not timeless moral verities such as “remain a virgin until your wedding night”, but generic multiples which tear sexual intensities away from their formatting as commodities on the fantasy market and reinvolve them with the world. That’s what I advocate - not “sex with love” as better than sex without, but love itself as “violent, irresponsible and creative” - in the words of Fernando Pessoa, quoted by Badiou: “love is a thought”. Amen.