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The End of Love. Eva IllouzЧитать онлайн книгу.

The End of Love - Eva Illouz


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progressive celebration of sexual freedom should be equally scrutinized not in the name of neutrality as Richard Posner demands in his study of Sex and Reason,23 but in the name of a more encompassing view of the effects of freedom.24 The principle of symmetry is relevant in yet another respect: critiques of the current sexualization of culture come from several cultural quarters—from movements for a-sexuality that reject the centrality of sexuality in definitions of healthy selves; from feminists and psychologists worried about the effects of the sexualization of culture; and finally from Christian majorities and (mostly Muslim) religious minorities living in Europe and in the United States. All these critiques are uneasy about the intensity of the sexualization of culture. Feminist scholars are the only ones who have paid attention to this unease, and anthropologists like Leila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood have criticized Eurocentric models of sexual emancipation from the standpoint of the subjectivity of Muslim women,25 inviting us to imagine other forms of sexual and emotional subjectivities. The critical examination of sexuality in this book does not stem from a puritan impulse to control or regulate it (I do not have such program in mind), but rather from a desire to historicize and contextualize our beliefs about sexuality and love, and to understand what in the cultural and political ideals of sexual modernity may have been hijacked or distorted by economic and technological forces that conflict with emotional ideals and norms held as essential for love. If this work is traversed by an implicit norm, it is that love (in all its forms) remains the most meaningful way to form social relationships.

      A final possible objection to my query has to do with the looming presence of the work of Michel Foucault in the human and social sciences. His Discipline and Punish,26 has been widely influential, spreading the suspicion that democratic freedom was a ploy to mask the processes of surveillance and disciplining entailed by new forms of knowledge and control of human beings. Sociologists devoted their attention to surveillance and viewed, à la Foucault, freedom as a liberal illusion, undergirded by a powerful system of discipline and control. In that sense, freedom as such was a less interesting object of study than the illusion of subjectivity that freedom creates. Yet, at the end of his life, in his Cours at the Collège de France, Foucault increasingly paid attention to the relationship between freedom and governmentality, that is, to the ways in which the idea of freedom in the market had redefined, in his words, a field of action.27 My book subscribes to the late work of Foucault from the standpoint of a cultural sociology of emotions.28 It views freedom as indeed a restructuring of a field of action, as the most powerful and widespread cultural frame organizing the sense of morality, conception of education and relationships, the fundaments of our law, visions and practices of gender, and, more broadly, the basic definition of selfhood of modern people. For a sociologist of culture, freedom is not a moral and political ideal upheld by courts, but represents an enduring, deep, and widespread cultural frame organizing modern people’s self-definition and relationship to others. As a value relentlessly harbored by individuals and institutions, it orients a myriad of cultural practices, the most salient of which is perhaps that of sexual subjectivity defined as “a person’s experience of herself as a sexual being, who feels entitled to sexual pleasure and sexual safety, who makes active sexual choices, and who has an identity as a sexual being.”29 Where Foucault debunked sexuality as a modern practice of self-emancipation ironically perpetuating the Christian cultural obsession with sex, I focus on another question: how does sexual freedom, expressed in consumer and technological practices, reshape the perception and practice of romantic relations, at their beginning, in their formation, and during shared domestic life?


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