Love and the (Wrong) World. Adorno and Illouz on an Ambivalent Relation

Abstract

According to many social and political theorists, economic rationality has infiltrated almost every aspect of our life on this planet: democratic activities, emotions and intimacy, morality, education, leisure, our internal and external nature. 1 Is there something that can resist and elude the economic logic? Is there something to value in ways that do not contribute to economic evaluation and valorization? One answer that might come to our mind is: love. And in particular, that kind of love that we find difficult to control or steer, that does not have any purpose other than itself and, in Harry Frankfurt's famous formulation, is not determined by reasons other than "reasons of love" (Frankfurt 2004). Is a love of this sort something real, more than an illusion or a fantasy? Can it really escape economy's grip? The aim of this paper is to investigate the relation between love and the capitalist society. When I speak of love, I refer here predominantly to forms of intimate, often passionate, erotic bonds between human beings who are not biologically related. 2 For the sake of simplicity, then, we can for now understand capitalism as a socio-natural ensemble of processes dominated directly or indirectly by imperatives aimed at maximizing individual economic profits. 3 How such imperatives work and what they imply in this context will become clearer at a later stage. I am not going to say or imply that erotic love is the only dimension of human (and nonhuman) existence that might contrast capitalism. What I want to suggest, rather, is that an inquiry into love can provide fruitful tools for better understanding critical and transformative practices. At least in the Western modernity, eros has been commonly understood as the form of love most disentangled and free from the rest of society. Social philosophers and sociologists such as Luhmann (1986), Giddens (1993) and Honneth (2014) have largely expounded upon and justified this view by reconstructing the process of differentiation, or "autonomization," of the social sphere of intimate and erotic relationships from other social spheres. According to these theorists, modern individuals fall in love for motives that cannot be convincingly explained by reference to social, economic, cultural and communal norms and values alone.

Philosophy and the study of capitalism

“…So, how can philosophy contribute to the study of capitalism? ( Cf Gregoratto 2021, 151). The problems with the theories discussed above suggest that philosophers, who want to contribute to that study, should aim to describe (i) something peculiar to capitalism, (ii) in philosophical terms, (iii) which has not been explained by sociological, economic, or psychological means (rather than reducing capitalism to sociology of economics, or using the concepts of other disciplines).…”