Manifesto of the Armed Front of Love

Every letterbomb in every functionary’s face is a work of love

For E.

We are the Armed Front of Love. Yesterday, we detonated a bomb on a bus in the middle of the capital. Last week, we were on the balconies above the Plaza of the 19th of June, firing indiscriminately into the crowds below. Our operatives sabotaged the wires on the cable car carrying a hundred foreign tourists to Frigate Island. Before that they released the chlorine gas in the ruins of the Roman amphitheatre. Whenever you hear the crackle of gunfire a few blocks away, or a blast snap through the torpid mug of the afternoon, we are at our work. We swarm the selvas. We have our hideouts in the humid hillsides only a breath away from the city, the corrugated-plastic cantegriles dripping algae-green. We descend to plant our flowers. Red carnations on the concrete. Twisted petals of gorewet steel.

The state calls us terrorists, and while we don’t really care if you’re terrified or not, we don’t refuse the name. Everything else they tell you is a lie. We are not a criminal gang, and we can’t be bothered to traffic drugs. We are not communists, fascists, nationalists, or Islamists. We do not act to further the ambitions of any foreign power. We have no intention whatsoever of liberating the great masses of the oppressed, or, for that matter, of oppressing them further. We have no list of demands. Our only ideology is love.

You might have heard this before. We’re hardly the first gang of terrorists and assassins to make the same claim. Every flimsy letterbomb in every drab functionary’s face is a work of love. There’s no act of violence so senseless it can’t be traced back to some tender love of nation or people or homeland or, for the most desperate, God. But we don’t engage in any of that stuff. A chalky ersatz of the real thing. In every generation there are also a few people who have so much overwhelming love for humanity in the abstract that they have to kill large numbers of merely actual humans. We’re not interested in that either. By love we do not mean a principle, or an ideal, or philia, or agape. Nothing universal or diffuse. Not the happy idiot stepping outside in the freshness of the morning with boundless love in his heart for all creation. Not the deep erotic principle behind every living being, which is why the buds break in September and mushrooms pop their glistening heads out of soft and rotten trees. Not the love that is patient and kind, does not envy, and does not boast. Not the love that’s all you need. We mean, specifically, romantic love: the warm wonderful love of one person for another.

Maybe even love is the wrong word. The reason we put bombs on buses isn’t even necessarily conceivable as love; that’s too abstract. The lover doesn’t think I am currently experiencing emotional sensations of the general type ‘love.’ They’re simply overwhelmed by the mere fact of the other person’s existence. Sheer sugary delight. Love is the subjective aspect of the beloved, in the same way that warmth is the subjective aspect of the Sun. You don’t choose to love someone; another person happens to you in the form of love. You would still love this person, you think, even if by some accident you’d been born five hundred years apart, and all you had was a face in a history book. But you’re both alive now; you have happened to each other. To love and be loved at the same time by the same person is a miracle, the only miracle that exists. Mathematically, it should be almost impossible. Like rocks colliding in the cold spaces between stars. But somehow it happens every day.

We have committed these atrocities because all of us are very happily in love.

We say this openly now, but the state has always been aware of who we are and why we do what we do. Their reaction has been brutal, and you will have already experienced some of the chaos. This month in particular, as the Air Force Intelligence Commission scours the bookings at low-lit restaurants for every table for two on the fourteenth. Now the marriage register has become a kill list. Now couples on paseo hand in hand along the waterfront at sunset might be bundled suddenly into unmarked vans and never seen again, or only as a pair of severed tongues stapled together and tossed bleeding onto the roadside at five in the morning. You can still buy chocolates and roses, in fact it’s encouraged, all the billboards remind you to, but afterwards men in dark grey coats with gunshot eyes will be following you home.

We welcome this repression. The arrests and disappearances of lovers are just a more acute form of what was already there, dragged halfway into the open, where everyone can see it. This recent round of hostilities does not mark the beginning of the war on love.

It didn’t call itself a war. It had other names. Talking stage. Situationship. Or self-care. Taking some time to focus on yourself. The Somme-heavy barrage of helpful, healthful messaging, here to inform you that you should not seek your self-realisation in and through other people, because other people will always disappoint you. For your own wellbeing, you should avoid allowing anyone to happen to you. But since the animal is weak and needs warmth, you are allowed to rub up against each other, just so long as you limit yourself to the utilitarian exchange of a few brief physical pleasures. To keep everything as transparent as possible, to reduce the risk of any messiness or exploitation, maybe it’s better if money is involved. Otherwise there’s a chance you might catch feelings, which is cause for a terrible anxiety. The last thing you want is to offend the other person with your pathetic hopes of being loved in return. Luckily, there are guides to help you feel nothing again. Do you actually love this person or is it a trauma response? Aren’t you just seeking validation from other people to fill the hole in your life that only you can fill? Consider all the ways they fail to match up to the checklist of necessary qualities you keep in your head. Remember that there’s no such thing as a right to love. Set boundaries. Limit communication. Keep dating other people until whatever hope you had becomes waterlogged and drowns. Love is the mad propulsion that tells you if you can’t have this one particular person your life is worthless—and your life is not worthless! You are awesome! You browse for other people with your teeth and tongue in the endless flat meadows: you are a herbivore. Life is pleasant as a herbivore. You filter other people with your ctenidia out the black algorithmic sea: you are a bivalve. A bivalve is enough.

Another name for the war is polyamory. Being polyamorous has nothing to do with fucking lots of different people; if that’s really what you want, there are ways of doing so with your dignity intact. But listen to how the polyamorous actually speak to one another. Do you have the emotional bandwidth for me to trauma dump on you right now? They're so careful! So delicate! So emotionally literate! They have so much more respect for each other’s needs and boundaries than the monogamous, even though you can usually tell that this fun non-monogamy game is quietly but thoroughly crushing the life out of one partner while the other pretends not to notice. Isn’t that odd? A lover has a theoretically unlimited duty towards their beloved, but not these people. They need to constantly negotiate between what’s acceptable and what might be an imposition. This is what the multiple partners are really for: to share the emotional burden, which means no one is entitled to anything, and you can’t ever make any real demands of anyone else. If your beloved is in someone else’s bed tonight, then how could you be responsible for their happiness? What a relief! Like being alone again, but with some warm bodies around. You might have some weak flaccid love for these people, like a cold puddle of undrunk tea, but you are not in love with any of them. That would be mad. That would be unsafe.

You are right, of course. Other people really will disappoint you. Some of them are dangerous. Some of them will make you unwell. Some of their demands will be unreasonable. Maybe depending entirely on another person was once a question of economic necessity, since one pair of hands can’t run a farm, but today we’re emancipated from that kind of obligation. Reproductive labour is waged now; you can order it off an app. Love was the ideological aura of a particular kind of domination; we’ve since discovered new, more exciting forms of domination, so the aura fades. We have always accepted the minimum level of sociality necessary for material comfort, and thanks to our technical advances that minimum is now very low. It’s pointless saying that we need each other and can’t survive alone; clearly we don’t, clearly we can. It’s miserable, but the alternatives were not always pleasant either. At least this is a predictable misery, where nothing is out of your control.

But look at the collateral damage, the things that vanish along with love. You think you’re focusing on yourself, but you don’t have a self, not any more; all this self-sufficiency is very unhealthy for it. Here’s a story. A lecturer at the art school in the old sugar refinery asked her students to create any work of art, in any medium, using any techniques, so long as it was about something other than themselves or their identities. They couldn’t do it. Half the class signed an open letter, accusing the lecturer of attempting to erase and invalidate them. They’d already erased and invalidated themselves. Someone with a healthy sense of self isn’t afraid that they’ll vanish if they ever break eye contact with the mirror. If you’re not interested in what lies outside your own self, if you can hardly even conceive of it, you don’t know where you begin and end. You have no idea who you actually are. At most, you have some demographic data. You are in pregenital oblivion, sucking milk out the void, and when you die there will be nothing to actually disappear.

The only way to actually know yourself is to love someone else. Love doesn’t mean dissolving yourself in another person, losing your own will and purpose, or abandoning your freedom. It means feeling out the outer edges that define your self in the form of the other. But you’re afraid of your edges, afraid to bear a theoretically infinite duty to what lies beyond them. So you engineer your own solitude, and then you make graphs about how it’s all because men and women now have different opinions about politics. You retreat into the safety of chauvinism or gendered spite. You fill your world with lifeless categories, so no one ever happens to you.

But tell us—what are you more afraid of? The possibility that the realisation of your freedom and the purpose of your existence lies outside the bounds of yourself? Or—a bomb?

This is not why we do it. In fact, none of this has anything to do with why we’ve been carrying out our campaign of terror. We’re not responding to the war on love, because it doesn’t really affect us at all. We are in love, not in favour of love. To be honest, we don’t really care what you get up to. When you’re truly in love nothing matters except the beloved. A love that’s just one part of an otherwise well-rounded life isn’t love at all; at best it’s a preference. All other ends are diminished. All other objects are hollow. You can try to express your devotion with the approved tokens, bits of plants, sugary snacks, stones, but the only real form for something so wholesome and good is unlimited atrocity. This one person is my world; this person means so much to me; I don’t need anything or anyone else; I can sacrifice the rest of the world at will. Have you really never loved anyone so much, with so much of your heart, that you just had to fire mortars into a police station about it?

We operate in cells of two. There is no command structure. Nothing to be extracted under torture. We are more numerous than you know. You will not defeat us.

You, of course, think that we’re insane. You’re in a relationship, but somehow that hasn’t turned you into a bloodthirsty killer. You’ve been in love plenty of times, and none of those times has it involved Semtex. Does this mean you weren’t doing it properly? Clearly not. If you fancy yourself smart, you might decide that we’re just externalising the ambivalence inherent in the love-relation. Our excuses simply don’t make any sense. And no, maybe they don’t. But see what happens the next time we detonate a bomb somewhere in the city. When you come home in the evening to find your girlfriend in a silent strop. It’s fine, she says. Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s just fine. You eat your dinner in silence. You watch TV. Finally the complaint leaks out two minutes before bed. If you really loved me, she says, you’d let off a nerve agent on the metro. If you love me so much why haven’t you stolen any fissile material? You stroke her shoulder and try to be nice. I do love you, you say, madly and fanatically, beyond all reason or measure, but what about the victims? Oh yeah, sure, she says, turning away from you. What about the victims.