The Break-Up

Abstract

Responding to a recent marketing campaign in Australia, this paper considers how the politics of love suggested in Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth (2009) may have pragmatic application for media studies. The publicity strategies of a major bank in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis provide a rich illustration of the ways love’s genres and registers can be directly co-opted towards commercial interests - and the challenges this presents for critical thinking. Placing Hardt and Negri’s ‘turn to love’ in the context of ongoing debates in feminist and queer theory, the paper isolates both the possibilities and limitations of autonomist thinking. The authors’ distinct contribution is to note the inventiveness characteristic of both love and poverty, which in turn provides a model for the kind of ontological bearing necessary to trouble the ongoing pact between intimacy and property under capitalism.