Ausgabe 1, Band 10 - Dezember 2020 - The Concept of Love in Arendt - Antonio Campillo

Oct 17, 2026

Ausgabe 1, Band 10 (Dezember 2020) presents Antonio Campillo’s study on Hannah Arendt’s concept of love. It argues that love is not a marginal private theme but a thread running across her work and shaped by experiences of totalitarian violence and Arendt’s turbulent relationship with Martin Heidegger. Using a ten-chapter analysis, the book links love to Arendtian distinctions between public-political and private life, and reconstructs love’s place across vita activa and vita contemplativa, from love without world to love of the world.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages3

Reading Time5 min

AccessFree to download

The Concept of Love in Arendt

Love across Arendt’s work: continuity beyond public/private divisions

Temporal and spatial re-readings of love in Arendt

Love as a fourth sphere of vita activa and its phenomenological consequences

Ausgabe 1, Band 10 – Dezember 2020 The Concept of Love in Arendt Antonio Campillo, El concepto de amor en Arendt (The Concept of Love in Arendt) Madrid: Abada, 2019, 156 pp. Hannah Arendt never developed a structured theory of love. However, the topic of love traverses her work from the beginning to the end. Many scholars have overlooked this journey and tend to consider her reflections on love a secondary issue within the framework of her philosophical and political thought, characterized by a whole series of distinctions between diverse spheres of human life. These distinctions are rooted in her own encounter with totalitarian violence, which destroys borders between “public-political” and “private-apolitical” realm and tries to dominate human beings from within. Moreover, they are connected to her own experience of love marked by her turbulent relationship with her professor and lover Martin Heidegger, that an eighteen-year-old Hannah Arendt had to keep it in secret until he joined the Nazi party in 1933. As she recognized years later, both events represent a double “shock”, of thought and reality, that would lead her to politicize her work. This recognition fostered the separation between the young German Jew student who was in love with her professor and interested in introspective topics, and the mature political theorist, forced to look at the world and relegate love to the private life. Campillo's book, The Concept of Love in Arendt, begins by questioning this discontinuity. Not only he confronts the tradition of scholars who consider her treatment of love a juvenile or private subject, but he considers it “the invisible black hole around which the luminous Arendtian galaxy gravitates”.1 In just ten chapters, the author delves into this galaxy in order to show how the experience of love is “the keystone that allows us to understand the close link between what she lived and what she thought”.2 The three first chapters are particularly focused on accounting for this link. After a brief exposition of the classic positions from which her reflections on love have been interpreted, Campillo dedicates the second chapter to dismantling the temporal division between the young woman in love and the political thinker. Through an analysis of her youth writings in which the theme of love has greater presence, he shows that they are not restricted to that first period and accompanied her all her life. The third chapter call into question the spatial distinction that Arendt herself established between the public-political and the private-apolitical realm of vita activa, as well as the psychic division between passion and mental activities of vita contemplativa. On this occasion, the author takes her biographical experience into account to demonstrate the continuity between the personal/intimate and the political. A continuation that goes from “love without world” —or the love passion that deletes the distance between lovers—to the “love of the world” shared with others in the experience of plurality that equals us in the ability to differentiate ourselves as unique beings. 1 Antonio Campillo, El concepto de amor en Arendt,(Madrid: Abada, 2019), p. 136. 2 Ídem Agustina Varela-Manograsso | The Concept of Love in Arendt | [http://www.hannaharendt.net](http://www.hannaharendt.net) Going through some of the most important affective ties in Arendt's life, Campillo finds in her reflections on the construction of the “microworld” between lovers an intersection point between private and public life, and he also discovers in the expression“love of the world” a “bridge between the modalities more intimate and public of plurality”.3 Both discoveries come to account for the continuity between love and politics present in her work, despite her deliberate attempt to separate them. In the fourth chapter, Campillo recovers Arendt's Philosophical Diary where she surprisingly considers love as the fourth sphere of activity inc

FAQs

Why does Campillo challenge the idea that Arendt’s love is a secondary private topic?

Campillo argues that love traverses Arendt’s work from beginning to end and acts as a key for linking what she lived with what she thought, despite her deliberate effort to separate love from politics.

What role do biography and historical experience play in Campillo’s interpretation?

The book connects Arendt’s encounter with totalitarian violence and her secretive relationship with Martin Heidegger to a double shock that pushes her to politicize her work, shaping how love relates to thought and reality.

How does Campillo treat the relation between private love and political life?

He reconstructs how Arendt’s love notion creates intersections between private and public spheres, moving from “love without world” to “love of the world,” understood through plurality and the ability to differentiate oneself as unique.

Oct 17, 2026

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