ABSTRACT
Modernity holds out both a promise and a loss for love. The promise is contained in modernity’s horizon of freedom, a horizon from which love can be viewed as a movement in the social relations of intimacy from singular or mutual enslavement to mutual autonomy. From the position of love’s loss, there is a perception that in the modernity of this fin de siècle love is in deep crisis, along with all other forms of associations that humans establish with each other and with nature. Cultural images of love, or at least of intimate life, emphasise broken marriages, unhappy and temporary heterosexual and homosexual relationships, emotional dysfunction or collapse, loneliness and despair. Left to themselves, the men and women who inhabit the sphere of intimacy appear to be bereft of the necessary emotional resources that enable them to come together for any length of time. The contemporary experience is, thus, not of love. Love is the catch-all phrase for relationships bereft of love, or of solitary individuals who mourn love’s loss, often in the inarticulable void of grief. There is another side that dovetails with this apparent sorry story and
experience about love – the side through which love is culturally understood and represented. It is assumed that prior to the contemporary predicament, the subject’s experience of love was located in a language or an emotional culture of love that preconditioned and gave meaning to the experience of love in a way which ensured that this experience could be commonly understood and mutually shared. It is assumed that this culture of love has either died from exhaustion through overuse, or has been commodified and commercialised to the extent that its meaning has been thinned to the four-lined rhyme of a St Valentine’s card. Love is celebrated en masse, not as an event, but as a memory. What emerges in this portrayal is a double-sided picture that, from the side
of subjects, paints a portrait of emptiness and grief, and from the side of culture paints a landscape of one-dimensional forms in tones that glide into one another. Love’s owl of Minerva has spread its wings at the fall of dusk, that is, at the end of love’s long day. The night, as the conventionally understood time for love, now brings solitude filled only with unfulfillable longing.
Bereft of significant meaning and experience, erotic love in the third millennium and in the shadow of the second one, is now a stranger. In other words, the ‘experience’ of love has no great points of reference or orientation under which it can be gathered and conveyed as a culturally shared, reproducible and thus ongoing experience (D’Arcy, 1954; de Rougemont, 1983; Lewis, 1990; Bauman, 2010). It is a shallow, mobile culture and experience, and the suffering that it creates is treated as a pathology by professionalised therapeutic experts (Johnson, 2010: 117-132).1
