Revolutionary Love, Feminist Affect and Social Solidarity In Liberation Politics

Paulo Freire believed it is a profound love what counts in liberation politics: Without this type of love, it would be difficult to find the nerve and motivation to challenge the status quo. He noted how “love is an act of courage” searching for freedom in all possible ways.

In Sociology of Freedom, Abdullah Öcalan looks at social solidarity (‘Asabyyah’ in ancient Sumerian) as pivotal for direct democracy. In Rojava, North-East Syria, radical hospitality and Revolutionary Love go beyond family ties, with the necessity to overcome toxic gender relations and hierarchies among cultures/religions, for Hevjiyana Azad ('free life together’).

Öcalan refers to a type of affect quite different from the dominant and individualistic feeling based on possession: it is a type of love able to reconnect humans in the struggle for the collective goal to live (in the present time, not in an imaginary future) freedom, beauty and ‘equality in the difference’. Among people our ‘divine’ aspect should be reflected in all relations: he calls this liberation process ‘a battle for love’.

In Sara Ahmed’s feminist politics of affect, the ‘doing’ of emotions is bound up with ‘sticky relations’ between signs and bodies, through which all surfaces and boundaries of what we live as worlds get materialized. Is it possible a ‘feminist life’, beyond performing as a proud kill-joy, and avoiding social pressures toward institutionalized ‘happiness’? In the liberation struggle to actively de-patriarchalize our lives (women/men/othersubjects) our conflicts based on internalized oppression, competition and political fragmentation, can be creatively subverted.