/ 69 Tears of Potentiality, Love of Liquid Rupture GEORGIOS TSAGDIS The present essay collects the singular plurality of love, its countless forms and expressions in the figure of the tear, where love weeps and breaks at once. In this equivocation, the tear signifies the possibility of all relation, in which love operates as pure potentiality. Arranged in two parts and a coda the essay examines the genealogy of an ongoing theoretical exclusion of the potential of love from politics. It argues that love in its singular plurality must be placed at the heart of every revolutionary and emancipatory project in the service of difference. Accordingly it turns to Elizabeth Smart’s writing, where the twofold figure of the tear sets the stakes of love into relief, demonstrating the debt love incurs in the unfolding of its immense potential, which makes possible an incessant recreation of the world. Language finds here the means to relate the experience of rupture and liquidation of the self, an experience violent and creative in equal measure. The essay closes with the summative significance of love’s potentiality as the force that sets into motion a task that surpasses itself, a cause for which its infinite power is bound to prove insufficient yet evermore indispensible. Introduction Among the countless crises of the twentieth century, the fading of love as a decisive category in the production of ethico-political meaning has been among the least considered. The forgetting of love was forgotten. The present essay offers itself up to the recent acceleration of the recovery of the potential of love. In its text love emerges not merely as the original or continuing condition of philosophy (Badiou 2012, 3), but as the identity of thought itself (Nancy 1993, 85). Thinking through love and as love is thus summoned to animate every future emancipatory undertaking in the service of difference. The essay begins with a confrontation of three eminent gestures in the genealogy of the exclusion of love from politics. Wollstonecraft, Arendt and Badiou are examined as representatives of radical political and feminist Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 43, No. 1 [69-84] © 2020 Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute, India