age. […] This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story.
—Svetlana Alexievitch, Secondhand-Time3
Notes
1 1. Quoted in Saphora Smith, “Marc Quinn: Evolving as an Artist and Social Chronicler,” New York Times, August 13. 2015, accessed September 9, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/arts/marc-quinn-evolving-as-an-artist-and-social-chronicler.html?_r=0.
2 2. Understand that to be subversive is to move from the individual to the collective. See Adb Al Malik, “Césaire (Brazzaville via Oujda),” https://genius.com/Abd-al-malik-cesaire-brazzaville-via-oujda-lyrics, accessed February 13, 2018.
3 3. Quoted in Alison Flood, 2016. “Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich Heads Longlist for UK’s Top Nonfiction Award,” Guardian, September 21, 2016, accessed February 13, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/21/nobel-laureate-longlist-for-uks-top-nonfiction-award-baillie-gifford.
Acknowledgments
After a two decades-long inquiry into the topic of love, I became interested in its frequent handmaiden “unloving,” which is all at once a process, a feeling, and an event. “Unloving” is not a topic as exhilarating as “love.” But, as I found out, it is one that shows even more acutely and incisively the forces of the social in our psychic life. Many people have helped me think about the nature of these forces.
Chronologically the first, Sven Hillerkamp was a wonderful partner for discussion. Sven’s notion of negative modernity has not much in common with my own notion of negative relationships, but his cheerful intelligence was the best soundboard for budding ideas. A large number of people made this text better and helped me all along its writing: Daniel Gilon and his indefatigable energy, rigor, responsiveness, and thoroughness brought this book a few notches higher. Ori Schwarz, Shai Dromi, Avital Sikron, and Dana Kaplan read and offered insightful comments and bibliographical references. I want to thank students and teachers at Yale University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, New York University, Princeton University, EHESS, and fellows at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Some critiques were stinging and hostile, some were sympathetic, but all were helpful. They all made me think harder. I want to thank Paris Sciences Lettres, without whose generous grant in the form of a Chair of Excellence I could not have achieved this project.
I thank mostly John Thompson and the entire team of Polity Press who have saved this book from many shipwrecks.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I thank the men and women who shared stories—in formal interviews or in informal conversations—and helped me piece together the ordered landscape of disordered lives. All of the above are reminders that academic and intellectual life is deeply collaborative and that the solitary confinement of writing would not be possible without the bonds of confession and conversation. To all I send my deep thanks.
1 Unloving Introduction to a Sociology of Negative Choice
[T]o see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
—George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose”1
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.2 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 even a few hours ago. This silence is all the more puzzling as the number of relationships that dissolve soon after their beginning or at some point down along their emotional line is staggering. Perhaps our culture does not know how to represent or think about this because we live in and through stories and dramas, and “unloving” is not a plot with a clear structure. More often than not it does not start with an inaugural moment, a revelation. On the contrary, some relationships fade or evaporate before or soon after they properly started, while others end with slow and incomprehensible death.3 And yet, “unloving” means a great deal from a sociological perspective as it is about the unmaking of social bonds, which, since Émile Durkheim’s seminal Suicide,4 we have to understand as perhaps the central topic of sociological inquiry. But in networked modernity, anomie—the breakdown of social relationships and social solidarity—does not primarily take the form of alienation or loneliness. On the contrary, the unmaking of bonds that are close and intimate (in potentiality or in reality) seems to be deeply connected to the increase of social networks, real or virtual, to technology, and to a formidable economic machinery of advice-giving or help-giving. Psychologists of all persuasions—as well as talk-show hosts, pornography and sex toy industries, the self-help industry, shopping and consumer venues—all of these cater to the perpetual process of making and unmaking social bonds. If sociology has traditionally framed anomie as the result of isolation and the lack of proper membership to community or religion,5 it now must account for a more elusive property of social bonds in hyperconnective modernity: their volatility despite and through intense social networks, technology, and consumption. This book inquires into the cultural and social conditions that explain what has become an ordinary feature of sexual and romantic relations: leaving them. “Unloving” is the privileged terrain to understand how the intersection between capitalism, sexuality, gender relations, and technology generates a new form of (non) sociality.
*
Psychologists have been entrusted with the task of repairing, shaping, and guiding our sexual and romantic life. While they have been, on the whole, remarkably successful in convincing us that their verbal and emotional techniques can help us live better lives, they have produced little or no understanding of what plagues our romantic lives collectively. Surely the myriad stories heard in the privacy of psychological consultation have a recurring structure and common themes that transcend the particularity of their tellers. It is not even difficult to guess the recurring theme and structure of the complaints voiced in those settings: “Why do I have difficulties forming or maintaining intimate, loving relationships?” “Is this relationship good or bad for me?” “Should I stay in this marriage?” What is common to the questions endlessly reverberated throughout continual all-invasive therapeutic advice in the form of counseling, workshops, or self-help books used to guide our life is a deep, nagging uncertainty about emotional life, a difficulty in interpreting our own and others’ feelings, knowing how and what to compromise about, and a difficulty in knowing what we owe others and what they owe us. As psychotherapist Leslie Bell put it: “[I]n interviews and in my psychotherapy practice with young women, I have found them to be more confused than ever about not only how to get what they want, but what they want.”6 Such confusion, common inside and outside the office of psychologists, is often taken to be the result of the ambivalence of the human psyche, the effect of a delayed entry into adulthood, or of a psychological confusion produced by conflicting cultural messages about femininity. Yet, as I show in
