“EXILED FROM ALL GREGARITY”: PROFANE LOVE, POETICS AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION IN BARTHES AND AGAMBEN

This article offers the literary and philosophical concept of “profane love”, following the juxtaposition of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of singular love and his political and poetic project of profanation, with the figurative and scattered notions of love found in Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. The article opens with a critique of the discursive state of love today and its relation to politics and power. Following Barthes idea of an obscene and Agamben’s notions of profanation and exposure, the article argues that love should be thought of as an experience in passivity that happens in the encounter and touch of two separate singularities. This process, the article argues, involves the imagination, and as such is thought of with regard to political and poetic imagination. The article thus thinks of Agamben’s notoriously pessimistic figure of the Homo-Sacer – the abandoned man – in a new light. It argues that the lover, as a participant in a radical experience of passivity and exposure, can also be thought of as abandoned, offering an affirmative perspective on Agamben’s political thought.