Unloving

Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people's lives – the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined to us, the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs our spine at the mere thought of him or her. To be in love is to become an adept of Plato, to see through a person an idea, perfect and complete. Endless novels, poems, or movies teach us the art of becoming Plato’s disciples, loving the perfection manifested by the beloved. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is far more silent on the no less mysterious moment when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or a few hours ago.
Unloving is Eva Illouz’ last installment in a two-decades-long study on the ways in which capitalism and the culture of modernity have transformed our emotional and romantic life. It inquires into the cultural and social conditions which explain what has become an ordinary feature of sexual and romantic relations: leaving them. What are the cultural and emotional mechanisms that make people revise, undo, reject, and avoid relationships? What is the emotional dynamic by which a romantic preference changes? By drawing on a wide range of sources – from Emile Durkheim to Jane Austen, from Karl Marx to Lena Dunham – and forcefully engaging with the question of emotional and sexual freedom, she reveals the choice to unchoose as a crucial modality of subjectivity – and unloving as one of the pivotal conditions of relationships in the era of radical personal freedom.