What Makes Love Anti-Political?:The Transformative Potentials of Professions of Love to the Dalai Lama and Donald Trump

I explore in depth Hannah Arendt's famous axiom "love is anti-political," through a close reading of speech acts or "professions of love" by Donald Trump, the Dalai Lama, and their most ardent religious supporters. This is a type of love South Asian religions term "guru devotion," which is mostly absent from recent anthropological investigations of love. Professions of love by and for gurus are constituent of the social worlds gurus foster around themselves. Trump and his supporters profess a love that the emphasizes allegiance and tribal politics, whereas the Dalai Lama professes universal love of all to his supporters who at times crave a more narrow tribalism. Apart from the differences in their messages, Arendt helps to expose why guru devotion to Trump can be so troubling politically: it transgresses the transcendent-immanent tension in Christian theology. In comparison, guru devotion to the Dalai Lama, based in Buddhist theology, is innocuous politically because it sidesteps Arendt's concerns.