Collective action and love

Abstract

In the context of this book, this chapter tries to draw attention to how inpractice love is a source of collective actions. Love is understood as an interstitialpractice that belies the alleged character of the totality of the regime oftruth of a society normalized in immediate enjoyment through consumption,and whose central axes are the banalization of the good, the politics of perversion,and the logic of waste (Scribano, 2021).The chapter tries to make evident how hundreds of collective actions, especiallyin Latin America, are performed based on a shared energy configuredaround the proximity and communality that produce and propitiate filial love.Based on this, we try to show how research on love allows us to understandthe current processes of social structuring and also reflect on the constructionof other futures.The present chapter aims to make evident how love, as an interstitial practice,produces a set of collective practices and how, through a mapping ofthese practices, it is possible to observe the connection between the politicsof sensibilities and social conflict. To reach this goal I have elaborated thefollowing argument: (1) I summarize the relationship between emotions andcollective actions; (2) I sketch a view of love from the social sciences; and(3) I present some examples of filial love as collective action. The chapter endsby advocating the need and urgency to continue mapping interstitial practicesas a key task for understanding the metamorphosis of the current process ofsocial structuration.