Читать книгу The End of Love - Eva Illouz - Страница 8

After a two decades-long inquiry into the topic of love, I became interested in its frequent handmaiden “unloving,” which is all at once a process, a feeling, and an event. “Unloving” is not a topic as exhilarating as “love.” But, as I found out, it is one that shows even more acutely and incisively the forces of the social in our psychic life. Many people have helped me think about the nature of these forces.

Chronologically the first, Sven Hillerkamp was a wonderful partner for discussion. Sven’s notion of negative modernity has not much in common with my own notion of negative relationships, but his cheerful intelligence was the best soundboard for budding ideas. A large number of people made this text better and helped me all along its writing: Daniel Gilon and his indefatigable energy, rigor, responsiveness, and thoroughness brought this book a few notches higher. Ori Schwarz, Shai Dromi, Avital Sikron, and Dana Kaplan read and offered insightful comments and bibliographical references. I want to thank students and teachers at Yale University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, New York University, Princeton University, EHESS, and fellows at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Some critiques were stinging and hostile, some were sympathetic, but all were helpful. They all made me think harder. I want to thank Paris Sciences Lettres, without whose generous grant in the form of a Chair of Excellence I could not have achieved this project.

I thank mostly John Thompson and the entire team of Polity Press who have saved this book from many shipwrecks.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I thank the men and women who shared stories—in formal interviews or in informal conversations—and helped me piece together the ordered landscape of disordered lives. All of the above are reminders that academic and intellectual life is deeply collaborative and that the solitary confinement of writing would not be possible without the bonds of confession and conversation. To all I send my deep thanks.