The politics of love is a clarion call to a new kind of politics rooted in I–you attachment – the politics of love. ‘Sex’ robots and the distortion in human relating that give rise to them will only lead to more horror and violence as dissociated attachments of the undifferentiated we, with people turning away from each other rather than towards each other, and the use of distraction, dissociation and fantasy in place of staying with the real.
Overview
I-you attachment
The Politics of Love is a new political-ethical project developed by Professor Kathleen Richardson. In her new book Sex Robots, the End of Love outlines the development of a new pronominal philosophy rooted in I, we and I-you attachment.
While these have a linguistic quality rooted in speech and language, the primary role of these pronouns is to signify the presence or the absence of relationships and is rooted in political-ethical frameworks.
The Politics of Dissociation
The egocentric I (the politics of individualism/the one)
The first pronominal paradigm to consider is the prioritizing of the I of western patriarchal philosophical systems. I refer to this model of relationship as driven by practices that are built on exclusion, based on sex, class, race and age.
A relationship rooted in the egocentric I is characterized as one sided, narrated as such, whereby the I with power is privileged over and above the other, which is othered, subordinated and objectified for use.
The undifferentiated we (everything is connected/the many)
The undifferentiated we, though always present alongside the egocentric I, has gained a fuller elaboration in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Academics and political activists in this approach challenged the ‘I’ in the form of a ‘we’ by dismantling one binary after another: fact/fiction, man/woman, human/machine. The ‘we’ always contained the seeds of its own downfall because it neglected the proximate reality of attachment. The logic of the undifferentiated we is blurring and dissolving.
The Politics of Love
I–you attachment (I–Thou)
The pronominal political-ethical philosophy I want to put forward is I–you attachment. It is a methodology developed from those theories and practices that focus on love, vulnerability and non-violence. I–you attachment is rooted in the real lived relations of people; it is neither egocentric nor an undifferentiated we. The primary idea of I–you attachment is twofold: there is no singular ‘I’ or collective ‘we’ of significance, only ‘I–you’; and people are made and remade through their closest relationships. There is an element of proximity that is essential to this experience, hence the rejection of representational technology of the human attachment figures. The family is the primary space to develop I–you attachments, but close friendships are also important. We are always present with each other, and thus it is a political ethics that rails against blurring people with property so they can be used instrumentally, denied autonomy, cast as inert, fungible, violable, owned and denied subjectivity.