Dismantling of romantic love and opening to other modalities of love in Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The paper approaches to the question of love in Hannah Arendt, in order to reconstruct the criticisms of traditional unworldly love with their anti-political impetus –romantic love, brotherhood, compassion–, and at the same time to delineate other worldly forms of love, that we found in the life and work of the German-Jewish thinker which are essential for political communities. In this context we concentrate into the criticism of romantic love present in her book on the life of Rahel Varnhagen, paying special attention to the condition as woman and its consequences in the love relationship. The dismantling of asymmetries between women and men, both in love relationships and in society, is fundamental to set up a common world and political communities that take in plurality and diversity. Arendt's reflections achieve a decentering of love with respect to the couple love, allowing its opening as a broader and worldliness phenomenon, expressed paradigmatically in amor mundi and in civic friendship. Thus, in dispute with the philosophical tradition, Arendt holds a conception of love, in which the love founded the common world and, at once, it becomes worldly.