Publisher's Synopsis
Love is a curious subject: its importance to cultural and intellectual history cannot be denied, yet it still appears to be taboo for many theorists. As Roland Barthes writes: "Everyone will understand that X has 'huge problems' with his sexuality; but no one will be interested in those Y may have with his sentimentality: love is obscene precisely in that it puts the sentimental in place of the sexual."1 Too much sexual desire can result in rehabilitation for addiction; too little sexual desire may be solved with a pill prescription-now for both men and women. Love resists such instrumentalization, but still has prompted innumerable attempts at its explanation. From Aristotle and Søren Kierkegaard to Emma Goldman and Julia Kristeva, writings on love span various philosophical traditions, and the authors of these writings would be extremely difficult to dismiss wholesale. Nonetheless, objections to mentions of love in contexts deemed inappropriate appear frequently and reliably. For example, Eva Geulen's evaluation of Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia claims that his writings on love are embarrassing, banal, and reeking of "anachronistic sentimentality."2 Especially in materialist thought, love is taken as an abstraction to be done away with. Agnes Heller observes that this regulation of feelings- including their expressed intensity and content-is common to all societies, as with the "etiquette" of mourning, for instance.3 Indeed, Robert Hullot-Kentor notes that prior to Minima Moralia (1951), in Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
