The Love of the Future: Openness/Totality

Abstract

Emerging in 1990s America among the educated white middle class, polyamory is not so much a trend or a movement, not so much a practice or theory, as a new ethic of human relationships that has long found no place within the framework of the nuclear family and cannot be described within its terminology. That which is commonly referred to as the crisis of the traditional family is, in essence, the emergence of new forms of the same, but until the appearance of the term “polyamory” these forms had no language to describe themselves except in negative terms with regard to traditional social mores. In its doctrine, polyamory has brought together the most recent pop- ular achievements of European humanitarian thought, including gender theory, feminism, and queer theory. In principle, it represents a kind of collection and complex of explanations of why it is that entering into in- timate relations with multiple people can be just as acceptable from the point of view of the wider society as doing so with a single partner, and of how this can be done in an ethical manner without adversely affecting, oppressing, or causing suffering to anyone (utopian components are, of course, just as present in polyamory as the sadomasochistic).