Original article: Nuestro amor y el de ellos (parte 1)
By Juan Pablo Orellana de la Rosa
When you love, you calculate interest
And when you fall out of love, you calculate again
For us, to love is like being reborn
And if we fall out of love, we don’t fare well.
(You and Us, Mario Benedetti)
There is something that advanced capitalism struggles to fully digest: love. It has managed to digest (or rather, integrate, as philosopher Herbert Marcuse would say) dissidence, part of feminism, and countercultural elements, as it can commoditize everything, including desire—transforming sex into an industry, creating apps to «manage» relationships. However, it still stumbles over a stubborn residue.
This residue is love when it is not tamed or framed in a neoliberal context.
Our era has made attempts to strip it of meaning. We are taught to connect as consumers: to evaluate, compare, and discard. Affective language has become filled with business terms—compatibility, emotional investment, cost-benefit—as if the experience of love were a service contract that I can limit myself to and rescind when it no longer serves me.
Alain Badiou, a philosopher who has long advocated for the communist hypothesis as an existential coordinate, clearly identifies the subversive potential of love in times of far-right politics and neofascist governments: we live under the conviction that each person pursues their own interest, and love then emerges as the practical refutation of that ideology.
To love means to accept that existence is no longer organized around the One, but opens to the experience of the Two; ultimately, love has the power to break free from the recalcitrant selfishness that is the common foundation of this right-leaning culture.
For this reason, the system seeks to neutralize it, turning it into just another consumer good. Contemporary culture increasingly promotes a “risk-free love”: calculated encounters, affinities verified by algorithms, emotions kept under control. Nothing should destabilize the productive subject. Nothing should endanger the continuity of the self as a small business.
But a guaranteed love is a contradiction in terms. To love involves exposing oneself to the unpredictable, introducing into life something that cannot be managed. It is, at its essence, an anti-utilitarian act in a society obsessed with utility.
The cultural offensive of neoliberalism has aimed to reduce love to a consumable experience—quick, replaceable, light—just like a coffee from Starbucks, because only in this way can it be integrated into the commodity circuit. If everything is interchangeable, so too will be bodies, stories, and promises.
Therefore, defending love is not a sentimentality. On the contrary, it carries significant political and axiological weight that distances us from a commodified love, on one hand, and from the innocuous critiques of “romantic” love that part of feminism promotes, understanding that what is defined there is merely a historical construct functional to the social order. And sometimes, one might conflate the idea of free bonds with a new form of consumption: consuming encounters of any kind.
That is why we want to contest a terrain where the shape of the society we inhabit is also at stake. In a space where everything pushes towards the fictitious self-sufficiency of the individual, love reappears from a militant perspective, as an experience that disarms that illusion and forces us to step outside of ourselves.
Because loving does not simply mean feeling something for someone. It means accepting that life can no longer be thought of in singular terms. It is precisely there—in that uncomfortable shift from the One to the Two—where its true political charge begins. Not in the romantic moment of encounter but in the decision to build, sustain, and view the world from this new shared condition.
In this way, love and revolution resemble each other, for what matters is not the day of victory in the process, but rather what begins to be constructed afterward, when the fervor of the encounter subsides and a new occurrence starts to take shape.
In other words, what matters for love is not making a «match» but what happens the day after, when we come to know each other in our virtues and flaws. Ultimately, this is the scandal that love introduces into our time. And it is this scandal that is worth examining with greater attention.
Juan Pablo Orellana de la Rosa
