I’ve finished the first draft of a novella with internet dating as its central theme and I’m back to considering the idea of dating profiles etc.   Alain Badiou’s ideas, already discussed in a previous post, were helpful in terms of ‘safety first love’ with the dating profile allowing us to pick and choose people prior to meeting them.  But its not just this ability to check up on someone anonymously that has me flustered.  I think its that we come to meeting the person with a prior knowledge we wouldn’t have access to otherwise and this colours the way we see them. The Philosopher’s MailRead More →

In 2008, a conversation took place between philosopher, Alain Badiou and interviewer, Nicholas Truong at the Avignon Festival as part of the ‘Theatre of Ideas’ series. This conversation was later extrapolated on, translated into English and entitled In Praise of Love. I discovered this work while researching for a novella on online dating. There were reservations, you see. I felt an underlying brutality to this new system of love-seeking, more a ‘king hit’ from a street thug than the lovers’ embrace, but I could not put my finger on it, until In Praise of Love. Badiou calls it ‘a safety-first concept’ of love. In nominating traitsRead More →