The Other before self-love

Abstract

This short text is an invitation to reflect on the idea of self-love, since as it has been constituted by current liberation movements (understand feminisms, enviromentalisms, union struggles, anti-racist struggles and labor movements), although they want to attribute a revolutionary and radical characteristic to it, it ends up adopting principles and behaviors of reactionary roots. To do this, the violent characteristic of self-love will first be reconstructed (in the young Hegel and in the capital work of Stirner) to later identify texts by some contemporary authors –such as Ricoeur, Lévinas or Dussel– other theorizations of love that can guide towards an understanding of it as something that may or may not be revolutionary (insofar as it is capable of radically changing some domination system), but that must leave the sphere of the Self.