Emotional modernity – Eva Illouz

Now here’s something else, in terms of critical libido. The invention, the power recasting, the change of parallax, the density of stakes reshaped. Here in her recent (2018 in the original German) The End of Love. À Sociology of Negative Relations.

This is another new path of mine – back to exploring the dimensions of the private and subjective and intersubjective. After unhappy (and entirely instructive : the learning from this summable as : there is a sociology of access to « the political » ) sojourn in the social, public and political. Which I shall not be without. But this is where Illouz’s option is astute and excintingly lucid : there of course is a (needed) sociology, and political economy (liberal capitalism, ‘modernity’, and now their derivation in neoliberal globalization is neatly distinguishable from The believed universalism of the psychological approach, and its « therapeutic industry » she adds), of emotion, emotional individualism, and the whole cultural, economic order of the private.

Ça commence comme ça – et par une inscription délibérée, un peu lourde en connexion épigraphique, dans une histoire discursive de : « être subversif, c’est passer de l’individuel au collectif » (cité de Abd Al Malik) et « I don’t ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age … This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story », de S. Alexievitch.