Synopses & Reviews
Philosophy and Love introduces readers to philosophical reflections on love from Plato to the present. Bringing philosophy together with popular cultural analysis, Linnell Secomb provides an interesting and engaging account of theories of love throughout history. Along the way, reflections on same-sex desire, cross-cultural love, and internet romance are considered against the ideas of Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Derrida, and Fanon, and other contemporary cultural commentators on the human condition. The work also looks at cultural productions of love ranging from Sappho to Frankenstein by focusing on archetypal stories of love and love gone wrong. Philosophy and Love reveals an ethics and politics of love that discloses the paradoxes, conflicts, and intensity of human love relations.
Review
"Includes theorizations of love as inflected by postcolonial theory, queer theory, and contemporary popular culture technology studies." --Penelope Deutscher, Northwestern University
Review
"... a nuanced discussion that considers some of the more challenging cultural theorists, novelists, and filmmakers who have something to say about what love is.... The book is wide-ranging and thoughtful... Recommended." --Choice Indiana University Press Indiana University Press Indiana University Press
About the Author
Linnell Secomb is Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Sapphic and Platonic Erotics
2. The Paradoxical Passions of Shelley and Nietzsche
3. Simone de Beauvoir's Desperate Housewives
4. Levinas: Love as Responsibility
5. Colonial Love in Fanon and Moffatt
6. Irigaray: Loving Indirection
7. Barthes: A Lover's (Internet) Discourses
8. Butler and Foucault: Que(e)rying Marriage
9. Amorous Politics: Between Derrida and Nancy
Conclusion
Bibliography