The End of Love

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Eva Illouz. The End of Love

CONTENTS

Guide

Pages

Praise for The End of Love

The End of Love. A Sociology of Negative Relations

Dedication

Notes

Acknowledgments

1 Unloving Introduction to a Sociology of Negative Choice

Love as Freedom

The Malaise with a Critique of Freedom

Choice

Negative Choice

Notes

2 Pre-Modern Courtship, Social Certainty, and the Rise of Negative Relationships

Courtship as a Sociological Structure

Pre-Modern Regulation of Sexuality

Courtship as a Pre-Modern Mode of Emotional Decision-Making

Certainty as a Sociological Structure

Normative Certainty

Existential Certainty

Ontological Certainty

Evaluative Certainty

Procedural Certainty

Emotional Certainty

Sexual Freedom as Consumer Freedom

How Sexuality Became Free

Consumption as the Unconscious of Sexuality

Sexuality as Morality, Liberation as Power

A New Social and Sexual Grammar

Notes

3 Confusing Sex

Casual Sexuality and Its Elusive Effects

Casualness and Uncertainty

Uncertain Frames

The Uncertain Territorial Geography of Relationships

Sexuality as a Source of Certainty

Uncertainty and Negative Sociality

Notes

4 Scopic Capitalism and the Rise of Ontological Uncertainty

The Value of the Body

Producing Symbolic and Economic Value

Evaluation

The Encounter as an Evaluative Interview

Consumer Evaluation

Sexual Devaluation

Beauty as Obsolescence

Devaluation through Parceling

Devaluation through Refinement of Taste

Shifting the Reference Point of Evaluation

The Confused Status of the Subject

Notes

5 A Freedom with Many Limits

Consent to What?

Muddled Wills

Volatility as an Emotional Condition

Exiting without a Voice

Trust and Uncertainty

Notes

6 Divorce as a Negative Relationship

The End of Love

Divorce and Women’s Position in the Emotional Field

The Narrative Structure of Departing

Sexuality: The Great Separation

Consumer Objects: From Transitional to Exiting Objects

Autonomy and Attachment: The Difficult Couple

Emotional Ontologies and Non-Binding Emotional Contracts

Emotional Competence and Women’s Position in the Relational Process

Notes

Conclusion Negative Relations and the Butterfly Politics of Sex

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

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M

N

O

P

R

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V

W

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“Eva Illouz presents a bleak but fascinating analysis of what the modern world has done to love … The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac said he wanted to be the historian of the human heart. The Franco-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz might be called the historian of human heartbreak.”

The Irish Times

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The question of freedom has become even more pressing as the public philosophy and legal organization of liberal polities has privileged one specific type of liberty, namely negative liberty—defined as the freedom of actors to do what they please without hindrance from the external world, as long as they do not hurt others or obstruct their freedom. Such freedom is guaranteed by law and cultivated by many institutions supposed to guarantee one’s rights and privacy and that contain little or no normative content. It is the “emptiness” of negative freedom that has created a space (the space of “non-hindrance”) that could be easily colonized by the values of the capitalist market, consumer culture, and technology, which have become the most powerful institutional and cultural arenas of modern societies. As Karl Marx remarked long ago, freedom contains the risk of letting inequalities flourish unhindered. Catharine MacKinnon drives this point aptly: “[T]o privilege freedom before equality, freedom before justice, will only further liberate the power of the powerful.”30 Freedom then cannot trump equality, because inequality vitiates the possibility of being free. If heterosexuality organizes and naturalizes inequality between the sexes, we can expect freedom to meet, confront, or naturalize such inequality. Only rarely does freedom trump inequality in heterosexual relationships.

What Isaiah Berlin called “negative freedom” has let the language and the practices of the consumer market reshape the vocabulary and grammar of subjectivity. The same language of interests, utilitarianism, instant satisfaction, ego-centered action, accumulation, variety, and diversity of experiences now pervades romantic and sexual bonds and thus demands from us a sobering inquiry into the meaning and impact of freedom, without, however, ever putting into question the moral progress that the struggles of feminist and LGBTQ movements represent. To endorse the historical accomplishments of these movements and to continue their struggle should not prevent us from examining the ways in which the moral ideal of freedom has been deployed historically and empirically in market forms, which also appeal to freedom.31 In fact, understanding how ideas and values, once institutionalized, have a trajectory that is not always the one intended by their proponents will help reclaim the initial ideal of freedom, which was the impulse behind these movements. Thus if neoliberalism has notoriously entailed a demise of normativity in economic transactions (transforming public institutions into profit-making organizations and turning self-interest into the natural epistemology of the actor), there is no reason not to ask whether sexual freedom does not have similar effects on intimate relationships, that is, whether they do not mark a demise of normativity in naturalizing self-centered pleasure and instituting sexual competition and sexual accumulation, thereby letting relationships go unregulated by moral and ethical codes. In other words, has sexual freedom become the neoliberal philosophy of the private sphere,32 a discourse and practice that melts away the normativity of relations, naturalizes the consumer ethic and technology as a new form of emotional self-organization, and makes the normative and moral core of intersubjectivity less intelligible? While freedom itself has been a powerful normative claim to oppose the institution of forced or loveless marriages, to assert the right for divorce, to conduct one’s sexual and emotional life according to one’s inclinations, to grant equality to all sexual minorities, we may wonder if today that same freedom has not unmoored sexual relations from the moral language in which it was initially steeped (for example by disposing of the language of obligation and reciprocity in which all or at least most social interactions had been traditionally organized). In the same way that contemporary monopolistic capitalism contradicts the spirit of free exchange that was at the center of early conceptions of the market and commerce, a sexual subjectivity tightly organized by consumer and technological culture conflicts with the vision of emancipated sexuality, which was at the heart of the sexual revolution, because such sexuality ends up reproducing, compulsively, the very schemes of thought and action that make technology and economy the invisible movers and shapers of our social bonds.

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