Eva Illouz : autonomy & recognition – sociologies of modernity

Eva Illouz, luminous as she can be. The cruelty of sociology and its source of relief too, as disindividualization. Unstrangulating.

Confusion is a psychological trait, but its etiology often has a sociological basis. (Why Love Hurts, 135)

As simple as that. Pointed.

The implication of Hegel, slave & master dynamics in the subject / object patterns of recognition, with the Kojève input : particularly clarifying. On the modern contradiction of the subject. And of course then Butler. 130-131. I remember the days of those discoveries. What the figure of the black slave (pictures of US situations in vaguest Épinal format) was to me, on the petit stage of this self, in their theatre of power.

151 : The therapeutic persuasion addresses the main difficulty of modernity – to have a grounded sense of self-worth – by calling on actors – especially women – to generate self-love and, even worse, to feel inadequate for loving the way women are taught to love: that is, by ouverte displays of care. [ « moral cultures », and their historical transformations ]