Generativity Under Power: Trust, Asymmetry, and Estrangement in Intimate Relations

This paper asks how love fares under power. Where the Philosophy of Intimacy and the Theory of Justice series has theorised intimate relation as a generative process—a coupling out of which value is generated rather than extracted—it developed that account, in effect, in a clearing, leaving unconfronted the field of asymmetries that can deform, capture, and freeze the very generativity it describes. The paper confronts power directly, through three questions and one object. The object is love, in the precise sense of the dynamics of the real between two subjects —what circles the unsymbolisable and cannot be counted, traded, or managed. The questions ascend: how love creates a world (the generative-relational being, here extended by an etiol ogy of estrangement); how love is preserved from destruction by power (a theory of international relations reconstructed away from its realist core, toward the order-problem of opaque subjects under no authority); and how love becomes free within history (a dialectical historical materialism). Its central claim is that the tools of power can protect the conditions of love but never produce love itself—a political economy ofconditions, neveroflove—withtrust the sole interface across the two levels. Two further claims follow: that estrangement is, in the first instance, a necessary moment of aliving bondrather than its failure; and that a generative relation does not oppose power but the freezing of power.