I'm working my way through Introduction to Civil War, and I came across this passage: "In the stockpile of instruments deployed by the West against all forms of community, one in particular has occupied, since around the twelfth century, a privileged and yet unsuspected place. I am speaking of the concept of love. We should acknowledge that the false alternative it has managed to impose on everything—“do you love me, or not?”—has been incredibly effective in masking, repressing, and crushing the whole gamut of highly differentiated affects and all the crisply defined degrees of intensity that can arise when bodies come into contact. In this set of false alternatives, love has functioned as a way to reduce the extreme possibility of an elaborate working out of the play among forms-of-life. Undoubtedly, the ethical poverty of the present, which amounts to a kind of permanent coercion into coupledom, is due largely to this concept of love." Is there a work of theirs where they flesh this out a little more? The issue of modern concepts of love and monogamous relationships seems to come up at least once in just about every work of theirs, however it's always just as a tangent. Perhaps some others can add their own interpretations of this issue here as well. I have to admit I'm a little suspicious any time things like these are brought up. Any instance of attacking the institution of monogamy that I've experienced or heard/read about always seems to be at the expense of the women in the collective/party/whatever. It breaks down and stops being about liberation and becomes an opportunity for males to engage in a ridiculous macho fantasy handed down to us by the ruling culture.
I don't think its about monogamy or even romantic love, necessarily. I think they're talking about the way you're "supposed" to act when you're in love and the way one expresses love. So you could apply it to romance, but don't have to necessarily.
You're right I maybe jumped to a conclusion. I can certainly identify with feeling frustration in how one's love is to be expressed, the “do you love me, or not?” captures that very well. Later on they talk, again as a tangent, about how under empire the individual acts as a cop towards him/herself and that the couple under empire does much the same towards one another. I wish it was a topic they took on more directly.
