As our conversations continue about freedom, joy and pleasure, the idea of Love became paramount. 

Love is the opposite of Fear. In order to eradicate fear one route of action most likely to succeed is to love all the more ferociously. The love we refer to is all kinds of love; love for the self where we must learn to nurture ourselves, to develop our Anti-fragile mindset and see stress and trauma as a catalyst for growth, to heal and pursue what is sometimes a lifetime of recovery; we must learn how to love one another to operate from a position of forgiveness and acceptance; for humanity to consider the ethics of our place in world and how to impacts on others, for the earth and in how we treat our environment, and indeed for life itself where we must cultivate a sense of curiousity and open-mindedness even when things are not going so well. Essentially in the midst of so much carnage we must love harder, find more capacity to operate from a position of abundance. 

In our work within teaching and learning and in our work as pleasure activists, engaging in discussion about Love might feel indulgent, but Love is the core driver for most of those who devoted to a particular social cause; love working against fear is an act of courage akin to a kind of faith. Badiou states that 'Love is, first and foremost, a matter of literally unjustified commitment to and encounter with another person' (Badiou, A. 2003). I would suggest Love as commitment does not need to be with only another person, it can be a commitment to an idea, we commit through daily action, an artist commits to their practice for instance, a freedom fighter commits to their cause, just in the same way a mother commits to her child. It is in practice we love, and we must practice how to love.

"The encounter", as understood by Badiou is a moment where we access truth, the truth of a situation which facilitates a feeling of joy and an expansion of our subjectivity – this truth is inherently aesthetic in its nature. He refers to this as a "truth procedures" and there are four realms in which this may happen, Love, Politics, Art and Science (We have been using these themes as a methodology in our Teaching and Learning over the last year as a basis through which to practice Consciousness Raising).

Love as a creative act is a conversation with the world where one is interested in connection to others. Freire the pedagogue, a teacher whose theories are invested in facilitating a dialogue between teachers, learners and the world through creative and critical thinking states ‘if I do not love the world – if I do not love life – if i do not love the people – i cannot enter into dialogue.’ (Freire, P. 1970) Our work as teachers are always dialogic between our students, the world and ourselves. We never deal in depositing knowledge, rather we co-produce knowledge in dialogue.

Bell Hooks, another of our key titles for this research talks of "living by a love ethic" and explores the values of a loving life, it is a political act to live in such a way. Again the term commitment comes up, we can’t set a goal to love, we set a commitment to life by a love ethic

‘Commitment to a love ethic transforms our lives by offering us a different set of values to live by. In large and small ways, we make choices based on a belief that honesty, openness, and personal integrity need to be expressed in public and private decisions.’ (Hooks, B 2001)  

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London, Penguin  

Hooks, B (2001) All About Love, New York, Harper Collins

Badiou, A. (2019) Happiness, New York, Bloomsbury Academic.