Purchase
Polity
July 2012
On Sale: June 26, 2012
293 pages
ISBN: 0745661521
EAN: 9780745661520
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate
relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a
woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when
we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet
searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind
dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less
than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in
which the search for love is a difficult and often painful
experience. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of
these experiences, our culture insists they are the result
of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the
Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an
individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for
why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis
and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in
convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the
misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of
this book is to change our way of thinking about what is
wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not
dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware
psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we
love. The argument of this book is that the modern romantic
experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the
ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples
from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of
evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of
choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the
spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have
transformed the very core of the will, how we want a
partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and
the organization of desire. This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it
shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions
and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy