The erotic imaginary, autonomy, and modernity

John Rundell

pp. 102-116

in: Harry Blatterer, Pauline Johnson, Maria R. Markus (eds), Modern privacy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Modernity holds out both a promise and a loss for love. The promise is contained in modernity's horizon of freedom, a horizon from which love can be viewed as a movement in the social relations of intimacy from singular or mutual enslavement to mutual autonomy. From the position of love's loss, there is a perception that in the modernity of this fin de siècle love is in deep crisis, along with all other forms of associations that humans establish with each other and with nature. Cultural images of love, or at least of intimate life, emphasize broken marriages, unhappy and temporary heterosexual and homosexual relationships, emotional dysfunction or collapse, loneliness and despair. Left to themselves, the men and women who inhabit the sphere of intimacy appear to be bereft of the necessary emotional resources that enable them to come together for any length of time. The contemporary experience is, thus, not of love. Love is the catch all phrase for relationships bereft of love, or of solitary individuals who mourn love's loss, often in the inarticulable void of grief.