Sex, Love and City-Twinning

Cities cooperating across shared national borders often describe their relationship as one of twinning. As a policy of naming, a play with symbols and construction of identities, they renounce bordering and draw almost exclusively on their assumed similarity. This has in extant research been viewed as utopian: two cities cannot merge across national borders into one. Their stress on unity and togetherness has thus been viewed as excessive and overstated. It is, however, important to approach city-twinning on terms of its own, and the paper endeavors to do that by drawing on Alain Badiou's separation between sex and love as different inroads into identity-formation with the former standing for an encounter between two separate selves whereas the latter entails an opening up and development beyond the initial selves. In love the individual goes beyond himself and enters a state of identical difference as Badiou puts it. The paper more generally argues that city-twinning offers a significant inroad into post-international relations.