1 The Ambiguity of Love. Beauvoir, Honneth and Arendt on the Relation between Recognition, Power and Violence 1 Federica Gregoratto (St. Gall) Forthcoming in Critical Horizon --- pre-proof version / please cite the published verison --- I. Introduction. What is love? This is undoubtedly a thorny question, not only if we address it from the perspective of our obscure everyday experiences, but also, perhaps even more dramatically, if we take into consideration philosophical (or other) theories of love. Love is a rather contested concept. Blind passion, ecstatic experience, unlimited source of joy and suffering, media of knowledge, moral sentiment, part of the recipe for a happy and healthy life, patriarchal or bourgeois trap: How to properly grasp and frame the nature of love? And how to normatively evaluate it? Boundless discussions have been undertaken in order to shed light on these issues. If we take into consideration love understood as an intimate, emotional bond between adults who are not tied by biological kinship, 2 we can roughly gather two different, if not opposite approaches. On the one hand, many recent philosophical publications either presuppose or explicitly argue that love is a constitutive component of a good, happy, healthy, fulfilling life. 3 On the other hand, feminist thinkers are inclined to regard love as a practice of subordination and oppression of, paradigmatically, women. 4 Between philosophers of love and their feminist critics, there seems to be no, or very little, dialogue. 5 In this paper, I aim at 1 I would like to warmly thank Penelope Deutscher, Estelle Ferrarese, Matthias Flatscher, Odin Lysaker and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and criticims that have helped me to improve the paper. 2 In this article, I concentrale only on this type of love, leaving aside other types, as for instance parental love or agape. 3 See e.g. Nozick, “Love’s Bond”; Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love; Helm, Love, Friendship, and the Self; Milligan, Love; Honneth, Freedom’s Right; Pettit, The Robust Demands of the Good. 4 See e.g. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex; Federici, Revolution at Point Zero; Illouz, Why Love Hurts? A Sociological Explanation; Jónasdóttir and Ferguson, Love. 5 There are of course exception, see e.g. Friedman, “Romantic Love and Personal Autonomy”.