Love as resistance? To Merab Mamardashvili’s understanding of love

Abstract

Mamardashvili is not typically regarded as a theorist of love. However, we would like to argue that love can be seen as one of the core components of his philosophizing, serving as a crucible of the human condition. He presents love as an unnatural and therefore fragile phenomenon, existing alongside consciousness, civilisation, personality, philosophy etc., that is to be continuously maintained and therefore recreated (in line with the cartesian law of continuous creation) in opposition to chaotically, naturally occurring processes. According to Mamardashvili, experiencing love may be seen as an act that contributes something to the structure of the world and not only to the people engaged in this relationship—a claim that may seem paradoxical when understood in terms of “classical” ontology. In this paper, we explore the way Mamardashvili understands the possibilities of such a recreation, arguing that his position is primarily ontological rather than moral in nature, challenging the Arendtian understanding of worldliness and therefore, potentially, her understanding of love as unpolitical.