“It is necessary to reinvent the place that love occupies in our lives”
- In the words of Alain Baduren, the philosopher has to be a connoisseur, an artist, a militant and, at the same time, a lover. Maria do Cebreiro meets all four requirements. But the philosopher is not accurate. Professor of Literature Theory at the University of Santiago de Compostela and poet. Now there's how to enclose affections with critical thinking.
Joy, sadness, fear, disgust and anger. These are the emotions of the human genus. Always according to the movie Inside Out.
A film that shows the ability of big entertainment corporations to incorporate a concrete imaginary into human consciousness. It must be acknowledged that the physical and experimental sciences are very skilled in their informative work and have managed to reach an agreement with the leisure industries. I am convinced that if the mentors of the film in question had taken into account the way in which literature and art have for centuries described the complex emotional group of people, affections would be mechanisms that are more subtle than they are shown.
Affections are becoming more subtle in merchandise, but in the context of cognitive capitalism.
Inside Out is precisely a sign of this development, which is present in the business world and in the working structures related to linguistic communication – universities, media, etc. In particular, the film reduces our ways of feeling to desperate pragmatism. Look at what you do with sadness: you justify it to the extent that it is “necessary”. What social class is this that invites us to classify the emotions that cross us as functional or dysfunctional, that deny us the right to feel or pleasure.
At the same time, affections are being translated into social and cultural studies, and an “affective turn” is taking place.
Of course, but from the point of view of critical thinking, it is important to be attentive to this turn. In a world where almost everything has been set on its way to explode, it seems that intimacy is the last frontier that remains to be overcome. And it must not be forgotten that academic knowledge also lives today, to a large extent, under the influence of markets and economic logics.
Roland Barthes said: “There is no science of love.”
I think Barthes was ahead of throwing love, when he said that to speak of love it is necessary, in a way, to be confused with love, to create a speech in love. There you see an exercise in transparency and honesty, increasingly scarce values, speaking without a network. And that position of speaking is also that of listening to each other.
Antonio Negri considers love a subversive force.
Love would be an active passion, because it drives people to do and share. In this sense, love exceeds the notion of the individual, but also of the couple, if we understand the couple as a simple increase of individuals. Negri defends the capacity of love to create community.
At Nymphomaniac, Joe faces love against a “love-obsessed” society.
When we talk about love, is it an affection that should lead us to a happiness that is deemed necessary? If we have love, simply “couple love” – generally heteronormative – is easy to match with the character’s phrase. However, I would say that the discourse of love is absolutely solitary, as it is reduced to the commercial logic of Valentine’s Day or the like, or to the machinery around a stable – heterosexual or homosexual – partner.
Then there's the technological virtualization of affective life.
Sociologist Eva Illouz states that the goal is to control the last strength of advanced capitalism beyond its competence, the intimacy of people. And it's quite disturbing to think about how capitalism turns business into loneliness or destitution of millions of people potentially, of all of us. The dissatisfaction of people is generated and exploited by the same instances of consumption.
Marina Garcés warns us of what is called romantic love.
Admitting that romantic love is a priori a bad love seems absurd to me. Psychologists and educators today have a monopoly on deciding what love is and what it is not. But it is indifferent to say that what must correct our loving attitude is the calculation – without a disguised projection of economic interest relations in personal relationships.
“Love is about to be reinvented,” said Arthur Rimbaud.
Judith Revel is a philosopher who insists that experimentation must be transferred to politics, not just aesthetics. And from that idea, I would add that in a world obsessed with controlling our way of feeling and relating, it is increasingly necessary to reinvent the place that love occupies in our lives, rather than reduce its effects, expanding its reach.
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