AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Slavoj Žižek describes amorous love as a disruptive, fiercely personal event that involves someone developing a passionate attachment to another person, so that the loved one becomes a ‘fragile absolute’ that fills out the horizon of the lover’s existence with an infinite purposiveness. This love is inherently individualistic and, on the surface, is at odds with a political program of universalism according to which every person matters equally. In this paper, I will argue that Žižek’s conception of love does have a political dimension that involves a revolutionary group living in fidelity to a political event in a way that affirms the capacity of any subject to live beyond the strictures and interdictions of a particular political order or situation. I provide an account of how Žižek’s idea of love is rooted in his Hegelian rewriting of dialectical materialism, his adoption of an atheistic reading of Christianity, and his conception of universality. I will then consider some implications of Žižek’s politics of love in a contemporary context.