Below the Radar Transcript

Episode 248: The Politics of Love — with Michael Hardt

Speakers: Samantha Walters, Am Johal, Michael Hardt

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Samantha Walters  0:06
Hello listeners! I’m Sam with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Michael Hardt, political theorist and Professor at Duke University. Am and Michael discuss the concept of political love, Michael’s research on revolutionary movements in the 1970s, as well as his past writing with the late Tony Negri, and how they continue to think together. Enjoy the episode!

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Am Johal  0:45 
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We have our special guest this week, Michael Hardt, joining us. Welcome, Michael. 

Michael Hardt  0:56 
I'm happy to be here. 

Am Johal  0:57 
Yeah. Michael, maybe we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit. 

Michael Hardt  1:01 
Myself. I don't know what to say about myself. I teach at Duke University in the US. I write generally, I suppose, about political theory and contemporary political movements. I think that's all I can think about myself. Yeah.

Am Johal  1:15 
Great. And of course, you were just here in Vancouver in December, talked about your wonderful book on the subversive seventies. And it was great to be in conversation with you. And as I've mentioned, I've been working on a book with my friend around friendship and community and how to rethink some of those debates and conversations from the 80s and much earlier around forms of authoritarian populism that are circulating today. And also around the broader ecological questions and how they bring forward today. And as I was sort of rummaging through the internet and other places, I came across a number of your lectures that you're doing, you know, almost like 20 years ago, on love. Along the political concept of love, I think, a number of years ago, I may have seen you give a talk at Banff around the same topic a little bit after that. And I was quite intrigued, because I think when, as I was going through a bunch of reading around friendship, and community, you of course, come across notions of love, and solidarity, and all of those things. But I wanted to, before I jump into all of those things around love in terms of what you were thinking about then and how you think about it today, but just want to talk a little bit about your own— You've spoken before in the past about situations of political struggle that you came out of, in the seven— you've got the 70s book, but also out of the 80s and things that sort of contributed to your own political orientation and approach to political questions. 

Michael Hardt  2:42 
Well, maybe one way to start about that, you know, I was not a... I was not a precociously politicized person. You know, many people in high school are already deeply engaged in movements. And I— it was really in my 20s that I began finding my way into modes of activism that worked for me, and really the beginning of it, and this is maybe the part that's relevant for us, is around migration in the US. I was involved in a movement in the US that at the time was called the Sanctuary Movement, which was really, the idea was bringing people from El Salvador and Guatemala that needed to leave because of US sponsored wars, bring them to the US, you know, clandestinely or illegally and have them housed in churches because the Immigration Services wouldn't deport them from churches. And then progressively, I moved with the movement first to Mexico City as a sort of contact person for coming north and then to El Salvador. And that was a helpful shift for me, and maybe if I had been smarter, or in different circles in the US, it would work then. But I— in the US, doing activism at the time, there felt to be a kind of moral quality to that activism. And that felt, very, I mean, a kind of outrage that drove the activism and which is justified and everything and a kind of moral overtone to it. What really shifted for me participating with Salvadoran movements at the time, during the civil wars, the discovering what for me, was a joy of struggle. You know, it didn't seem like a, either an obligation or a moral duty, or a sort of, you know, involving myself in a sense of condemnation, but the joy of struggle and joy of struggling together was something that I learned through the process. And maybe that could be an introduction to this question about love and politics, you know, that recognizing political struggle, not as a duty, or not only as a duty maybe, and not only aimed at its ends in effects, but the joy of the collective process of political struggle. It was an important thing for me, I'm not sure if it's even completely understandable the way I'm explaining it, this is the way in my own mind, the historical deconstruction of it was, and it very much shifted for me for I don't know, subsequent decades, my orientation towards, you know, both participating in and theorizing in movements, you know, that joy, discovering that joy and holding on to that joy, as a principle of political action.

Am Johal  5:17 
Yeah. So I wanted to— In terms of questions about love, we're a few days from Valentine's Day, but I want to differentiate, we're not talking about romantic love here, but a political conception of love. And when you were giving talks and doing some writing about it, you know, almost two decades ago, a little bit less than that. I'm wondering if you can sort of begin with just sharing about what was— What were you thinking about then that that became an important part to start thinking about and articulating in a theoretical way?

Michael Hardt  5:47 
One component of it was that I felt like in activist communities, you know, that I participated in, and it was also a period, maybe that period has continued where I find myself able to be with very many different activist communities. You know, in other parts of the world, it was a period, I sort of had the privilege of being able to, everywhere I went, even sometimes for academic reasons, I could always have access to the activist communities in whatever town. And so one of the things that I recognize is with young activists of a different generation than me, the notion of love was part of the vocabulary of the activism itself, like that they knew exactly what I was talking about, when I would talk about both joy and love. And it seemed to be directly part of their experiences. Where I had a great deal of trouble discussing this in other more theoretically defined contexts, you know, both academically and others and being understood, you know, like being understood, like, what were the kind of reactions I would get like? Well, of course, one reaction was, you know, Michael, you spend too much time with Italians, you know, it's a kind of, like, a thing. Or that, you know, it's, oh, that sounds religious to me, you know, the notion of love and politics. Or this, like you were just suggesting this, this conflation with the romantic. I mean, it's, I think that they are in some ways related, but that seemed to de-politicize the question, I think in certain contexts, and so I had, I had a great deal of trouble, I felt, like, being understood. In fact, that blocked me, you know, you're right, that I did for a certain period, use the opportunity to to try to explain what I meant, try to theorize what I meant about love and politics. But when I tried writing, I've never really written about it. Tony and I—Tony Negri and I—joint books we wrote together have brief sections about it, but I felt like he too, we, the two of us, were frustrated by the... What seemed to us a difficulty of the topic, you know, which discouraged me from really writing about it. I felt like I couldn't work through it. And in some ways, perhaps in conversation, like here with you, that can work better, you know, because then we can work out what, yeah, what we're intending by this. It's not like we need different— Well, I don't know. I'm rather insistent on not trying to resort to different terminologies, you know, to, I don't know, you know, in a certain activist and Christian context, you know, you'd say, Okay, well, we're talking about Agape. Okay, fine, you know, but I'm rather tied to understandings we have of love, and in some ways to orient the term, you know, hold on to the term and orient it towards what we mean by it. What I mean by it, there you go.

Am Johal  8:42 
And, you know, there's that, yeah, the distinction between Agape and Eros. And that becomes a beginning point in a number of ways, at least in the way that I encountered it, you know, the different ways that we can think of a political concept of love and how it might differentiate or differ from friendship or community. Or in the case of, you know, some thinkers like Alain Badiou, he views it as sort of, you know, part of a truth procedure. And these notions of intense, transformative fidelity, come out of love, or it has a relation to psychoanalysis for him as well. But let me start with that then, is like, how might we differentiate political concept of love from friendship and community. You know, Jean-Luc Nancy passed away a few years ago, and he was writing, of course, a lot on friendship, but wondering if you could maybe share some thoughts just around that proximity.

Michael Hardt  9:43 
I do think the relationship with friendship and the way that you two are writing about friendship in your book too, or it's not, it's not dissimilar. And it might be idiosyncratic for me. Like, let's try and work through this. That for me, what is important about... Well, actually, let's back up a minute, because I think this is something about friendship and love, both enjoy that that's important to consider. Now, I'm just gonna just say something totally obvious, but it's usually good to start with such things, which is that, you know, doing politics is obviously not just about interests, and even always outcomes. You know, that politics is also about the passions. And that, you know, negotiating the passions is a central part of political theorizing, and political action. I mean, it's even, it's sometimes helpful to get the least sentimental of our theorists, and maybe we come back to them, actually, you know, Machiavelli I was thinking of, I can't think of anyone less sentimental. Except maybe Spinoza, who's also writing about love and not particularly sentimental either. But anyway, let's leave those aside and get to the, you know, start with the more immediate things. For me, friendship, the distinction that's useful to me is that in friendship, you know, of course, we are transformed in friendship, like with any encounter, we are transformed. But for me, love is a real losing of our previous selves, you know, so that in the kind of transformation we go through in love, is one of the things that seems very important to me. And so you might say, I mean, this is why I was hesitating about the terminology. You might say, well, okay, in friendship, that's also equally true. And if it is, then look, let's just use the terms interchangeably in this. But that's one of the things that I hold on to about that word and I guess the concept of love is its transformative character. I mean, I guess I would, there would be two basic things, you know, one is that recognizing love as a bond, you know, love is the strongest of bonds even. And then love as, as even a process in which you are radically transformed. You know, at least sometimes people can understand friendship, as I am me and you are you and we form a kind of connection or an alliance, but it doesn't, it doesn't really change who we are. But like I keep stuttering here, almost, because I recognize that friendship is a rather capacious concept that has very different definitions. So, but anyway, that's where I would start with at least, it's that, you know, both the strength of the bond and the transformative character that I identify in political experiences. You know, I both think it from political theoretical perspective, but also in a practical one. I mean, even just appealing to— I mean, anyone can think about their own political experiences. And the ones that I think are most successful or ones that we recognize with most success are ones in which we found ourselves transformed. And in which we created seemingly unbreakable bonds, you know, something, profound bonds, let's call it that way.

Am Johal  13:04 
Yeah, when we were working on the book, one of the people we spoke to was Leela Gandhi. And it was interesting about, you know, her kind of refusal to define friendship, but also, a friendship as the possibility of something unproductive, kind of useless. There was a— A friendship can be productive, but it can also be useless because there doesn't need to be an outcome in the way that love or a relationship or say a comradely relationship. Might be Jodi Dean's Comrade, of course distinguishes as well that, you know, there's a political solidarity built into the bond, where you may not even necessarily like each other, but you have each other's back. In the case of friendship, you might just do the durability of time, nobody so long, even though your politics might not be the same, but you can still be friends. And so there's a series of distinctions that can kind of play out and we define those, I suppose, all in our own ways. One of the things that you— and I wonder if you could speak to any of that, but also you, in your lectures you spoke about, in a way that love is a form of excess or a form of exclusion in terms of how we might relate to nation, ethnicity, tribe, these kinds of things. And I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about that aspect of love of an excess or something overdone or a distorted love even?

Michael Hardt  14:29 
I think I know— Stop me if I'm going down the wrong track. But it's certainly true that love can be a horrible and destructive force. I mean, I think, I'm thinking of an essay by Sara Ahmed, but it's something one can recognize quite quickly, where it's, you know, we often talk about fascist groups, reactionary groups as being based on hate, and, you know, certainly hate plays a part in it. But there is, it might be more useful, actually, to think about them as based on love. You know, the love of whiteness, the love of us, you know, the love of... and I think that that, it's useful, it shouldn't discount the concept for us. It should make us, force us to have distinctions, I guess. Yeah. Within what political forms of love can entail or should entail. And there that, I mean, I think that the love of the same, I mean, the love of the self I mean that's, it would seem to me a qualitatively different— It doesn't seem to me difficult to make a distinction. Like when someone would say to me, or to say to you, or say something like, oh, but you know, those people too. They're also based on love. But it's a horrible form of love, and it's an easily distinguishable form of love. I mean, what would be, I would say a revolutionary form of love has to be involved in a love of differences. A love of getting outside of, not only outside of yourself, but outside of the same. And I'm saying this in very, whatever, abstract terms, but I don't know, it seems to be easily, actually, it doesn't seem that complicated what I'm saying. Especially if one were to start with, like, I was saying, like Sarah Ahmed was doing in this essay, which was, you know, start by looking at these white supremacist groups, recognize what they're acting out in terms of love, and don't allow that to therefore discredit love, like, oh, okay, therefore, love is horrible. But rather, allows you to make a certain kind of distinctions so that once we're then going to come say, well, what is the kind of political love that we want? It allows us to, yes, start. And not only what we want, what we do. I mean, in some ways that's what I've felt entirely with this project. That's why I started from that perspective about recognizing the way activists that I knew, you know, especially younger activists talked. You know, it's not, so it's I feel like I'm not inventing something. Even inventing a discourse that's outside, I'm just really trying to understand in some way systematically, what's already present. And I bet you, you felt that with friendship too.

Am Johal  17:08 
Absolutely. Absolutely. It was the sort of the term in the room that we mentioned, but didn't quite get to, in a way. But it seems to be the next question in a way and another one that comes up— I'm teaching a course in political violence and the right to move right now. And one of our guests last night is Svetlana Matviyenko, a wonderful cyber war theorist who happened to be in Ukraine visiting her parents when the Russian invasion happened. And we've talked a number of times just around notions of solidarity, how to remake solidarity, the relationship between solidarity and politics, and love and friendship, and how to draw that distinction. And Astra Taylor has a book out right now with Leah Hendrix. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. But there seems to be a lot of conversations related to solidarity as well. And maybe if we can put that term into the frying pan as well in its relationship to love. And maybe solidarity has a relationship closer to comrade than to love. But I'm wondering how you might think through the concept of solidarity.

Michael Hardt  18:19 
Yeah, here's how I would start with the distinction. Yeah, here's another, I— Sorry, that I think in these theoretical references, but I was thinking you remind me of Rosa Luxemburg's book on the 1905 revolution. And in that book, she's speaking, you know, at a certain point to the German left and saying, look, you all say you have solidarity with the Russians in their revolution, but that's not good enough. Because you’re understanding solidarity as something external, you know, like our poor cousins, I want to help them kind of thing. What you have to recognize, she says, you know, to the German left, is no, their struggle is really your struggle, so that you need to have solidarity with them. But not solidarity as an external thing, but really, as an internal project, like you need to understand. And you know, maybe now, you could say it could be that the different contemporary notions of solidarity we're talking about and comradeship already have that, but it does seem to me a useful starting point of how we understand solidarity, not as a sympathy, or a... Yeah, here's another example of the same thing. I mean, I don't know if it helps too. I was thinking of an essay by Iris Young, socialist feminist, and is really nurtured in the early 1980s. And she addresses her male, you know, comrades. You know, she's addressing the ones who have sympathy for the— Mostly in the labor movement to have sympathy for the feminist struggle. But she says, you know, like, I don't want your solidarity, if what's your solidarity means that, you know, you see our struggle as separate from yours, and you're going to, like, give us support or something. What you have to recognize is that the struggle against patriarchy is really your struggle against capital too. Like, you have to recognize that these are really part of the same thing. And then I want your solidarity. Yeah, all I'm getting out here,  maybe it's too simple a point. I think solidarity is often used maybe in common parlance as a kind of thing like, I don't know, I feel solidarity with the Palestinian people. They're all getting killed. It would be a different thing to have solidarity with the Palestinian people and recognize that their struggle is your struggle. You know, I don't mean that you have to give up what you're doing and become part of their struggle. No, that your actual struggle is that they're related. I mean, it's partly not that they're related. That they're intrinsically related, that the powers that they're both addressing are intertwined and mutually constitutive.

Am Johal  20:54 
I wanted to speak a little bit around, you spoke about it earlier, but I want to go into that question a little bit around, at least the theological description of love can denote a kind of love as a charity. Love as a kind of towards an other, versus the proximity in relation between love and justice. And how we might parse that out a little bit.

Michael Hardt  21:20 
I have found in discussions that the theological traditions on love can feel like a trap. I mean, because on the one hand, like when I'm just thinking by myself, or when I used to think with Tony, or reading, I do think there's a great deal that one can learn from the Christian and Judaic and traditions are the ones I know. I assume when it's, I think, from all of the theological traditions, there are ways in which, there are aspects, you know, of the way love is configured that can be useful. But like I say, the difficult thing, and here we are speaking with listeners, you know, which is that too often I find that once one includes a theological description, many listeners just now, say, close down the question because, okay, you know, that there's some, I don't know... Michael must become a Christian now, and I don't know what or something like that. I don't know exactly what the way of doing it is. Within the Christian tradition, there's wide and varied notions of love that seem to me either directly political or ethical politics. You know, this is both in Jewish theology and Christian theology, is this question about what love of neighbor means. And the love of neighbor. One thing I like very much, a formulation of it is an explanation, this was in, I believe, it's Rosenzweig's very mysterious book called The Star of Redemption. And he says, what the love of neighbor really means is love for an empty place, that could be filled by anyone. You know, so it's not like love of neighbor, like there's a specific neighbor, and that there is a kind of bond to that. But that with a mandate is, I don't want to call it a commandment. With a mandate is to be able to construct a kind of openness of a relationship to love that has plural possibilities. Yeah, so I like this notion of the neighbor not being an object or even a specific subject. But being yeah, like I said, this empty place that can be filled. You know, that can be filled by anyone.

Am Johal  23:39 
Yeah, it's definitely in how we define the neighbor, who's the neighbor, it definitely opens up a question of the approach to another and sort of alongside that is the kind of tradition of the love of the stranger. Or we can get into, you know, Derrida's notion of hospitality. But the love of the neighbor might be this approximal kind of orientation, but with the love of difference, it becomes the love of the stranger, and how do we love those who we don't know? How do we look across identity and difference and to approach a situation with love? And once we talk about that, in a kind of leftist orientation, people also kind of roll their eyes towards that. It can sound theological, as you said, and, you know, what does that allow for, in terms of political possibility, if we can think of love of the stranger in a kind of political context?

Michael Hardt  24:40 
Well, there's certainly a kind of inoculation against what I was talking about earlier, as a kind of, let's just call it white supremacist love, just to give it that. I think, which is, you know, love of the same or love of identity or something like that, you know, which because that's one way one can interpret love of neighbor. You know, the love of the neighbor is the one who was closest to you. So it's not really, it's a kind of false getting outside of yourself, you know. Only getting outside of yourself insofar as it's really what's most proximate to you. So that this notion about love of the stranger, I love that formulation. I would identify that with Walt Whitman as much as with someone else. Yeah, maybe rather than a formula that has its own practical output. It's more like a way out of notions of love that remain closed, you know,  within one identity but even within one community. You know, within sameness in the more abstract sense. It doesn't yet, and at least as we're talking now, I don't see quite yet how it can, you know, this love of the stranger, that has to be filled in some way. Yeah, so here's a more practical way to do it, you know, come back to, I was gonna say come back to Rosa Luxemburg, or the Iris Young thing about so, you know, when she is saying, you know, like we in our feminist movement, don't want your sympathy. Like the love of the stranger, you know, so that these men in the socialist movement who were, you know, not the whatever, you know, the worst ones. But to be able to get outside of, you know, love of the most proximate, they need a conceptual understanding of how their struggle, and the power structures they're against, are intimately interwoven with these other power structures. You know, so that the feminist movement isn't to them, you know, might be a stranger, if we're still working through these trends, but it's a stranger that they can recognize where they're struggling together. Or where they need to be struggling together. I'm fumbling a little bit, but I do think that without that, just that formula, love of the stranger doesn't— It could just sound like a bland, you know, you should love all of humanity, or you should love all of that exists. And you know, fine, but that doesn't really, to me, translate into political project. So anyway, maybe that, all that partly to say that I like this love of the stranger as a kind of inoculation against the destructive forms of love. But I think that it then needs to be filled with some content. But with a content that doesn't have to mean, you know, oh, it turns out, you are the same as me. You know, it has to be actually yes, you're different. That ultimately our political projects are necessarily tied. I feel like that some content like that has to be filling it the same way that I think it's the same principle, what I was saying with Rosa Luxemburg and thinking about the Russians, who are, you know, who tried and failed. They're foreigners, you know, they are strangers, but she wants them to be recognized as part of the same struggle. Yeah, that you can have strangers together and struggle. Maybe that's what... But it's the together and struggled, is still necessary for me to allow that. Yeah.

Am Johal  28:09 
There's aspects of when you were giving these lectures, you know, many years ago. It's also this notion of the kind of love as a kind of refusal of the couple, or the family. And family is, you know, is this thing that we inherit, we don't have a choice of who our family is. Love or hate them, they're your family. But we have this term of, you know, chosen family or these kinds of aspects. But also, these notions of love, be it homosexual love, be it polyamory, be it all these aspects that oftentimes when love is too stringently defined has its limitations or orthodoxies, or limits political potential, even within those confines. And I'm wondering if you could speak to that a little bit?

Michael Hardt  28:58
Absolutely. I mean, I do think, yeah, I was saying earlier that on the one hand, so often, I find that the recourse back to romantic notions of love in order to explain the political love, really can disrupt, you know, get the discussion  off track. But like you're saying, one should be able to, or it's true that one should be able to think about... And maybe sometimes it's, you know, sometimes it's on parallel tracks, let's put it this way. You know, there are certain notions of romantic love that, I mean, there's a long tradition of this, what love means is that we merge into one. Like, you know, I become you, you become me. I don't know, I can think of a classic poem by Goethe, about these two lobes of a leaf, you know, that we're part of the same thing. Yeah, and so both, I mean, in romantic terms, I find that disgusting. But that's actually beside the point for today. But if you would think there is a kind of parallel track of thinking that a political form of love has to be about the play of differences, you know, about not just negotiating differences, but forming bonds that recognize differences. I mean, sometimes you could think about what, you know, the nature of just what I was thinking, trying to think a few minutes ago about what seemed to me horrible conceptions of the romantic couple. They sometimes, there's a resonance or a parallel path, I guess, I would go with the political notion. I mean, the family, yeah, I have a similar disgust for the family. I mean, not because it's not chosen but because it's a repressive institution. You know, I mean, I don't mean... I'm sure you love your family, I love my family, whatever, you know, but if one steps back and thinks about the family and recognizes it as a repressive institution, it might be a guard against trying to translate that into politics. You know, and thinking comradeship as in family terms, you know, like creating even this notion of a chosen family or such like thing. I think it's just... Yeah, that's a longer, maybe it's a different conversation I'm entering onto here, about the institution of family and the need to abolish it. But what I guess, maybe the sensible thing that bracketing off another discussion for another time, is just that, that in many ways that it can provide, at least for me, a kind of helpful, getting beyond difficulties to think also in about the diversities among romantic forms of love, and ways that they help us see past the obstacles we're finding in the questions of political love.

Where I was just hesitating, just now, and I don't know, if this, let me just try it, if it doesn't work, we let it go. Which is that, the thinker who I had found super helpful about this, and posing the relationship even is Alexandra Kollontai. You know, early Soviet feminist and, you know, political leader and such. And Kollontai, you know, Kollontai's really arguing against love, and the couple as effects of property ideology. You know, she says that the bourgeois couple is really a property relation, you know, you are mine, I am yours, that we can't understand the bonds to each other except in property terms. You know, we've been so— Private property has made us so stupid, as Marx liked to say, that we can only see bonds as property relations. And so... And it's not the Kollontai meant by that, that, you know, we should not have bonds with each other, or, you know, she also wasn't, you know, people's sometimes read her as being, you know, against monogamy for that reason. I don't think she cared less who you had sex with, or how many people you had sex with, it's rather the nature of the bonds we have with each other. So what she proposed is a form of red love, you know, like that the Soviet— She thought that we need to invent a new love, that's a communist love, no longer a bourgeois love. And she's primarily thinking about property relations. You know, even our relationship to children, you know, she says, you know, like, there's a bourgeois notion of children as property. And in fact, that you only take care of them, because they're yours. Like, that's someone else's kid. Okay, they can starve because they're not mine, they're not my responsibility. Because there's a property relation that's defining it. She has a number of interesting things to say, but I think even just the provocation is interesting. You know, like, what would be a communist notion of love, even at the level of the couple, you know, that's where she's starting, the couple and the family, the intergenerational relationships. If we don't have property relations to bind us or even a property imaginary, you know, of our bonds to each other. As I'm presenting it now, I realize I'm presenting it just as an open question, but a useful one. So anyway, the way I started down that road is that she is someone who is relatively successful, it seems to me, at trying to think love in the couple and political relations of love. But there are few who are good at that. That's a difficult, I'd say, that's a very difficult negotiation.

Am Johal  33:57 
Yeah. In some sense, as you've sort of remarked or hinted upon, that, you know, to have subjectivities capable of democracy—Of small d democracy—we need to have love and joyful encounters to create a kind of durable horizon. In a way. I want to come back for a moment, like Badiou writes about love in a particular sense, and it's a rigid sense, as a truth procedure. But I want to kind of maybe bring up his notion of fidelity. This notion of, you know, the world changes, but it's that intense fidelity that helps form a political subjectivity. And could there be something there attached to love that we could maybe think through?

Michael Hardt  34:42 
Right. Yeah. So you're suggesting, you know, we shouldn't think about fidelity in terms of the couple. Or fidelity in terms of some other. But rather fidelity to the event. You know, that we have a— That we maintain a constant relationship, to take constant orientation towards even, you know, the events, political events that we want to affirm. And I think that's right. I'm trying to think through if that's true to Badiou's formulation. You know, he poses events like... Christ's death is an event, you know, that Christians are faithful to, in that sense. Or maybe a revolutionary moment as an event that we have fidelity to. The term fidelity hasn't worked for me particularly well, because it sounds too much like an obligation rather than as an affirmation of desire. Do you know what I mean? You know, like, but this is not, I'm not saying that that's what Alain Badiou means. But, you know, when we talk about fidelity in common speech, it is often abiding by an external obligation, regardless of your own desires. You know, so that you— And that's what I would like the fidelity to mean. You know, the kind of fidelity that you're referring to in his work is that we are pursuing joy. Yeah, okay, let me translate Badiou into Spinoza here. But I give a very simple Spinoza example. You know, so Spinoza defines joy as the increase of our power to think and act. When we sense joy is when we become more... Try just the thinking part, you know, we became able to think more clearly. And that love, then for Spinoza is the experience of joy, with the recognition of an external cause. You know, so that, I recognize that there's some external cause that creates that joy in me, and then I want to pursue that. You know, so I think of this just in super simple terms, like, most people that I have political conversations with, I feel like I come to the conversation knowing what I'm talking about. And progressively, I get more and more confused. I feel like I've become more stupid. That's a better way of putting it.

But then every once in a while, you meet somebody, or a group of people, with whom the encounters with them are entirely joyful in the Spinozean sense. Like, I can think better when I'm with these people. And I can act better when I'm, you know, when I'm with these people. And essentially what Spinoza is saying is, like, hold on to those people. Those are, you know, they bring you joy, which isn't— joy isn't here just, it isn't a question of pleasure in a passive sense, it's a matter of an active capacity. You know, so those people bring you joy, you hold on to them, that's love, you know, because you recognize that they are the cause of your joy. That might be a fidelity. Like, maybe we could call that fidelity, but there, of course, it's clearly not a fidelity based on some moral obligation. You know, like, I got married to somebody, and even though I don't want them anymore, I should be faithful to them, or I don't know, whatever, something like that. It's rather these are encounters that bring me joy, and that you should pursue them in so long as they bring you joy. Otherwise, then, you know, at least in the very geometrical Spinoza formulations, you know, then that falls apart. And it's true, it does. I mean, there are relationships, or even thinks of it in terms of banal terms, like study groups, you know, like, we form a study group sometimes, and it's fantastic. It's rare. As you know. But when you continue it, you know, like you do continue it, because it keeps bringing you joy, like keeps making you able to think better. At a certain point it might not, you know, they dissolve too. Is that still fidelity? I think it might be. You know, if fidelity... See, that's the other thing about fidelity that bothers me about the term. But I'm not criticizing Badiou here, I don't think I'm actually probably saying anything different than him, I'm just... The colloquial use of the term, both seems to involve an external obligation and a permanence. There's no reason to think of any of these things as forever. There's decomposition just as much as there's composition. So anyway, I would say, fidelity, if I'm going to use it this way, fidelity means pursuing your joy as long as it lasts. 

Am Johal  39:03 
I wanted to jump a little bit into— Thank you for that wonderful conversation. Because I think as you're thinking out loud about these questions that you were thinking through years ago, I'm in a similarly perplexed position. And so it's really useful to talk through it. But I wanted to spend just a little bit of time... I have your book right here with me. You came to do a talk generously in Vancouver in December, but wondering if you could, for our listeners who may not have had a chance to read it as of yet, if you could speak a little bit about this project and where it came from.

Michael Hardt  39:37 
So the project is really trying to work through, together, revolutionary movements in the 1970s in as many countries and contexts as I could, because I had the sense— Two senses, maybe, to start the project. One is that I felt like there is a political coherence to it, despite the diversity of the movements, so I mean, you know, things happening in South Africa, and South Korea, and Chile, France, North America, etc, that so... Geography, that there was a continuity that allows us to think through them together. And the other is a kind of continuity among different movements or sectors of the movement. You know, between gay liberation at the time, between feminist movements, between anti racist movements, between labor movements, etc. And so that was the kind of working on a kind of accumulation. And all of that with the belief or anticipation that we today have something to learn from them. From these movements in the 1970s. You know, so I guess maybe one of the premises about that is that the general historical common place is that, you know, the last revolutionary moment that was experienced was the 1960s, especially in the dominant parts of the world. And so that is held as like, that's what revolution is. And I think, of course, revolutionary movements, the 1960s, you know, were important in many ways and transformative. But my contention is that they are really a part of our past. And that instead, the movements of the 1970s, and the 1970s in general, are the beginning of our present. You know, I guess I mean by that two separate things. One is that, that the forms of domination, that there was a shift that often is remarked upon and much is written about the shift in the forms of domination in the 1970s. You know, that define our current era. You know, think of the general writings about neoliberalism beginning, whatever, in 1973, and Chile, or 1979 or '8 with Thatcher's election, whatever, something like that. Or shift from Fordism, to post Fordism, the deindustrialization of the dominant countries. You can think of a variety of other ways that we think of that. But more important for me is that, I would say the 70s are really the beginning of our era, because the political problems they individuated, the political problems they faced, continue to be our political problems. It's with those sorts of mandates or interests that I try to work through, you know, work through what I find most inspiring in the political movements in different countries. You know, I'm no historian, I don't pretend to be an historian, even though this sort of project might require a historian. I'm able to think politically, right? Or I feel like I'm— I'm a political theorist, maybe is a way of saying it. But it's really that I'm also interested in thinking with the movements. Like thinking or understanding the problems posed by activist movements today, and what are the kind of dead ends they run into? And what are the kinds of possibilities that these references, you know, we're recalling what these movements in the 70s had done, might be helpful for. 

Am Johal  42:53 
One of the interesting things you said in in Vancouver, towards the end of your talk was just, you know, because a number of those political movements didn't achieve the political ends that they articulated, or fell on to moments of political exhaustion or closure or the kind of meta political environment closed in on them, that we shouldn't read them completely as failures, but that they opened up a political horizon at the time where the political conditions are right that we have a lot to learn from them in terms of inspiring the present. And I thought that was a nice linkage. And  I suppose I could link that back to love and fidelity and a kind of way. But I thought that was an interesting aspect of what we learn. I know Asad Haider's been writing a lot about exhaustion lately, and those types of things. And there was a couple of books that are kind of adjacent. Well, Glen Couldhard was on that panel and he's writing a sort of prehistory to his 'Red Skin, White Masks,' but movements that get into the early 70s, including AIM, and others, the Red Africa book, as well out from from Verso, goes into the early 70s. And just, you know, for the parts that you weren't able to, it's an expansive book in and of itself, but of course, it can actually speak to these areas that you weren't able to get to, as well. And just wondering if you could speak to the kind of conversations that have opened up as a result of the book coming out, or what new thinking that you have, now that you've had other people encounter the book?

Michael Hardt  44:24 
Yeah, let me start just with that first part, because it was important to me to recognize, because that was, I felt like that was one of the obstacles to thinking about these revolutionary movements in the 70s, which is that they were all defeated. You know, that they, it's not as if we're writing about the Soviet victory, or, you know, even some ways— Well, okay, I mean, it's different with 68, in different places. But I think the movement's that I'm talking about in that area were primarily defeated. And the conceptual distinction I make just for myself is between failure and defeat, because the way I understand failure is that it results from an internal flaw. You know, movements fail when they have a, when there was something wrong with them, you know. In some ways, a failure is a dead end, you know, because it's, you know, you've realized what couldn't go on as is. And instead, these movements, I would say, were defeated. To be defeated is not a failure, because it's not referring to an internal flaw, it's referring to a superior external force. You know, forces of repression, but you know, as we know, in the 1970s, and today, forces of repression come in a variety of ways. I mean, there's actual military repression, but there's also all kinds of strange ideological repression, ways movements are defeated in other ways. So anyway, defeats aren't dead ends, it seems to me. Defeats pose the possibility of kind of a jumping off point. And that's why I find it most interesting of looking, you know, of understanding these movements. And you're right, Glen's work in his period's fascinating. And super useful in exactly the same way. I mean that it poses, yeah, a kind of— It's not just inspiration, you know, that feels too thin to me, when one says, you know, I'm inspired by it. But rather that it provided a plateau that they arrived at that we can use to go further. And like I was saying earlier, this is because the problems they were facing were the problems that we're facing today. Talking with other people about it, you're right, that is, I mean, that's always the pleasures of these sort of, of creating encounters around a book, you know, is finding... Both finding people who are, you know, doing actually even more interesting work on the same topic you wanted to do, or have allied projects. And I think it is, you know, there's a lot of interest in the 1970s, that, you know, in some ways, I'm just feeding into some, I would say, a sort of wave of interest. You know, especially in feminist circles, interest in the 70s is a definite thing. And I— Anyway, that's been part of the pleasure. You know, seeing people doing similar work.

You know, there's, let me just try one other thing, I'm not sure if this really fits, it's partly in response to a French film that I saw the other night. A new film, but one that, things I've been thinking while writing the book helped clarify this for me. And references, I feel like there's, there's often— This was what  this film was, called L'établi, you know, like, the... It's about the students who went to the factories after May '68 and established themselves there, you know, that's what they mean by 'L'établi,' the established ones in the factories. With the idea that they could then go, you know, make revolution there. So it has a certain sense of the time, and I find it, you know, interesting, it's based on a manuscript written then, you know, by someone who had done this. But I feel like today, there's a, it functions as a kind of nostalgia for not only the factory, and not only for the period in which it was imagined that the industrial worker could be the central protagonist in the entire revolutionary struggle. But a kind of nostalgia for a time when politics was clear. You know, like, on which side you're on. Like that it was clear, you know, like, okay, you want to make revolution? I know what you do. You go to the factory. Like, and they're the good— You know, like, you can ask which side you're on. And it's very clear, you're on this side or that. Today— And this is true, certainly true of the 1970s, why many people find them difficult, the revolutionary movements in them, is that that is a very difficult question. You know, the political context is much more complicated. There isn't, there aren't two sides, there's a great deal of ambiguity. You know, like, one can't simply choose one or the other. In fact, one of the great things, I would say, of the 1970s, is exactly what's lamented in many accounts, which is that what was called at the time the centrality of the industrial worker, you know, the assumption that, like I said a minute ago, that the industrial labor force, the industrial working class would be the leader of the revolution, that that was destroyed, you know, in part by capital's restructuring and exporting of production from the dominant parts to other parts of the world, and automation etc. I think that was a hugely beneficial event. You know, rather than having nostalgia for the clarity of a previous period. Either the 1930s, I feel like that's often also what the 30s dredge up is a kind of nostalgia for a political clarity, or for exactly for this even, you know, the period in the second half of the 20th century of the leadership of industrial labor. I think that it was a great opportunity that forced us to create in every movement even, the openness to a multiplicity of struggles and to work out the articulation among them. And that's hard, you know, like, I understand people want it. So anyway, the project has clarified certain things for me that I had a... That had previously just generated irritation in me, which I didn't know how to express it. See, that's not a bad thing actually in life is learning how to explain why you become irritated when you become irritated. Oh, maybe this is a prize actually. You know, because I did— So as part of after the book was published, I went, you know, I went in some university contexts, I went to some bookstores, and I also went to some, you know, activist spaces and such. And I was surprised, not a majority thing, but I was surprised that in some sectors, you know, of the movement, I still encounter a, you know, I guess what they will call a class first position. Not always— I mean, sometimes even a class only position but mostly a class first position, you know, which says, oh, yeah, Mike, all the stuff you're saying, it's right, but the primary struggle is really against capital. And, you know, that's what we need to do. So anyway, that was not necessarily a positive but it was an enlightening aspect of reactions to the project.

Am Johal  50:58 
The day that you did your talk in Vancouver, sadly, that was the morning that Tony Negri passed away and wondering if you could, at least for some of our listeners who may not know who Tony Negri is, a majority will know who he is. But just any thoughts that you wanted to share. Of course, somebody you worked very closely with. Led an amazing political life that has had so many ramifications and impacts, but somebody really connected to militant political struggle for his whole life.

Michael Hardt  51:30 
Yeah. That's hard. That's a lot. But it's true, like you said, maybe this is just even, just wanted to thank you for this, you know, like, it's true. You know, so Tony had died that morning. And then I was driving to Vancouver, and it was nice to be among you all. Like, that was, it was not a, you know, not an easy period for me, or day, you know, even. But that was a very... It was the right context to be in, you know. I guess you would say, among friends. But not just among friends in certain generic way, I mean, in a way that, you know, relates to Tony too. You know, of political discussion that is oriented towards action, you know, in organizing, you know, and so that does speak to him well. It's really hard to narrate, briefly, Tony's life, because it's, a lot of it's sort of Hollywood film-like, or ought to be a Hollywood film, I suppose. Or, yeah, I don't know if I should wish that or not. But it might be the best way to do that, is just sort of when I wanted to meet him, you know, so I was in I was in my mid 20s. I was a, you know, generic, relatively stupid graduate student. I felt at the time that my activist life and my scholarly life were completely divorced from each other. And reading some things that he had written, it seemed to me that Tony had somehow miraculously managed to make the two into one, you know, that his scholarly life and his activist life were intrinsically related. And that's partly why I sought him out. You know, in fact, to meet him, I translated a book of his. A rather erudite book about Spinoza, and then got in touch with him. He was clandestine in France at the time. And so, you know, instead, I had through this friend, I said I have translation problems, you know, in this book. You know, and he said, well, come to Paris for a week, and we'll talk about translation questions. And then it was great. We had a good time. That week, he said, when you moved to Paris, we'll... You know, how can you turn down an invitation like that? So I moved to Paris. So anyway, I mean, I think that is, though, what I really meant to say was, maybe the first thing that people should know about him was that he was able to... You know, it's not only that he was able to have an activist life, and that he was able to have a scholarly life. He was able to make his scholarly life directly inform his organizing and his activism and to make his activism and organizing directly inform his, like I say, even the most erudite type things like Baruch Spinoza, or Descartes, or Kant, or whatever you write about. And that's quite a trick. You know, I think when we talk about engaged intellectuals, say in this Sartre sense, that's something different. Yeah, we can think of many people we know that— I mean, this has been, even sometimes continues to be me, unfortunately, which is like, you know, you have a day job as an intellectual at the university or professor and then you have a night job where you do organizing, and you participate in movements. Anyway, that's a first thing that might get people interested in Tony, who don't know him, and try to seek out his work for that, for that reason. Yeah.

Am Johal  54:39 
I was gonna ask you... I know that our time is running out here. But just in terms of what are you writing and thinking about now? Do you have projects on the go right now?

Michael Hardt  54:49 
One thing that's true, I don't know if this is true for you, or for all the writers who are listening to this, but every time I finish a project, I feel like there are no more ideas in my head. And there will never be another idea in my head. You know, there's a kind of feeling of, whatever, having given everything, and that there's nothing left. Fortunately, so far, there has eventually come, there are, new ideas have come. So I'm a bit in that phase. I'm also having to do some things related to Tony. I mean, in the last period, we... He was quite sick. And we continued working as we had been for 35 years, you know, every week, we talked on the phone, every other month, I would go visit him. And we always had a book. In fact, I always thought it was a condition of our friendship. See I should come back to your concept there. That there be a book. You know, like so, it was the excuse, like, why were we talking on the phone so often? Of course, because there's a book. You know, like... We have to. So, even in this period where he was quite ill, in the last years, it was always, we were always working on a book. And he said about six months to me, he said to me, which I don't know, seemed moving at the time, where he said, look, Michael, you know, like, I'm not sure I'm gonna be alive for a whole 'nother book. But let's try and we can think of it in parts. And we've never been the type to publish articles. But if we don't make it to a book, they can be articles. A long way to say that, you know, now I have the responsibility of some of these articles that are more or less in outline form or something like that. So with a kind of fidelity to Tony, I don't know if that's the wrong term, using your fidelity wrong, now. But I do feel, yeah, it feels like something I should do. It could even be good for me, you know, like, get to, you know, it's a way of still being together. You know, still thinking together. Yeah, that's a better way of thinking about it. It's a way of still thinking together. Which we find ways of doing that with all kinds of people that we're not, you know, that either are dead or we've never actually met, but we find ways of thinking with them. So that's a good way of thinking about it. You're helping me. I'm gonna use that task I have as ways of continuing to think together with him. 

Am Johal  56:53 
Michael, I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar and wonderful to speak with you and look forward to seeing this work when it comes out in its own time.

Michael Hardt  57:06 
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's a pleasure.

Samantha Walters  57:12
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Michael Hardt. Check out the show notes to find more of Michael’s writing and research. If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.