Erotic Love in Sociology, Philosophy and Literature: From Romanticism to Rationality

Description

Why is ‘love’ taken for granted as a part of human experience? And why is sexual or romantic love in particular so important to us? This book aims to find out, tracing the intellectual history of sexual love, from the ancient Greeks to the modern day. Erotic Love shows how discourses of love have intersected with social and cultural trends, as well as with personal events and experiences. Beginning with the queering of love in Greek antiquity, it looks at how sexual love has been sung about, fictionalized and theorized as a cornerstone of the formation of Western culture. From the courtly love of twelfth-century troubadours and the rise of affective individualism in the eighteenth century, to the way the novel helped catalyze and crystallize the hopes and contradictions of love and marriage, these are decisive episodes in the history of romantic love. Lastly, the book deals with how sociologists and feminist theorists have made sense of the liberalization of sexuality over the last fifty years, especially given the post-romantic pragmatism of commercialized dating practices. Arguing against the over-rationalism of intimate life, Erotic Loverecognizes the need to liberate love from patriarchal, racist and homophobic prejudices, and highlights the value of literary and sociological traditions to emphasize how they dignify the rhapsodies and the sufferings of love. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents Introduction: Love is love is love 1. Eros in ancient Athens Eros, erastes, eromenos All things in moderation Greek pederasty and the problematisation of pleasure Philia, friendship and reciprocity 2. Platonic love The Symposium: Phaedrus and Pausanias Aristophanes Socrates and Diotima The ladder of love What about me? Love in Plato’s Phaedrus Enter Alcibiades The double flame The anthropology of love 3. Courtly love Tristan and Iseult The cautery of desire The religious origins of courtly love Eros vs agape The feminism of love The sanctity of the person 4. Affective individualism and the conjugal family A family state of mind Love before modernity The sexual revolution Women in early capitalism Affective individualism and bourgeois romanticism Marriage and the double standard Troubled pleasures 5. Novel passions ‘Reader, I married him’ Romance and the slave narrative The improbability of love Love is in the head Subverting gender Conjugal love disrupted Love and nature 6. Lawrence’s love The individual against society Utopia and disappointment The sensuality of woman The sacrament of marriage Lawrence’s worldliness ‘Repress nothing!’ The liberation of Frieda Weekley Lawrence in love The dialectic of love 7. The classical sociology of love Even Marxists fall in love The desacralisation of marriage The beloved’s right to secrecy The sacrament of sex The asceticism of Max Weber The parcelling-out of the soul Between passion and cognition 8. Religion, rationality and eroticism in Max Weber Religious rejections and the acosmism of love The search for meaning Aestheticism and eroticism Weber falls in love Rationalisation revisited 9. Love in late modernity Repressive desublimation The deployment of sexuality Reflexive rationalisation and the pure relationship The fatal heroism of love The casualisation of love Existential love Emotional capitalism Love’s hurtful reason Hierarchies of emotional competence Conclusion: Reclaiming the romantic imaginary Bibliography Index