The Transformative Potential of the Body. Arendt and the xxth Century Afro-American and French Caribbean Thought Towards Love as a Political Stake

This paper aims to inspect the reasons which Arendt uses to reject love as a source of political activity, as she rather views it as a passion impeding the human beings to take care of a common world. I undertake this aim by engaging into a dialogue between Arendt and some voices stemming from the black movement for civil rights and the Afro-American feminism of xxth century. My main aim is to highlight sundry blind spots of Arendt's apprais-al of love taking into account the contributions that James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde and bell hooks made to this issue. This dialogue under-scores the political potential of body and emotions to shape new civil frame-works in societies historically hit by racial violence, insofar as both unfold telling transformative features to endeavor a normative reexamination of the universal right to political agency.