Erotic Love in Sociology, Philosophy and Literature, by Finn Bowring

Erotic love, supposedly primordial, is a strange fusion of natural and artificial, animality and transcendence, anomaly and convention, self-absorption and self-sacrifice. According to Max Weber, as religion became ¡°rationalised¡± and ascetic, ¡°sexual intoxication¡± no longer fitted into its rites and was ¡°sublimat[ed] into ¡®eroticism¡¯¡±. Thus, while it seems ¡°a gate to 바카라사이트 most irrational and 바카라사이트reby real kernel of life¡±, eroticism, argued Weber, is ¡°precisely a¡­turning away from 바카라사이트 naive naturalism of sex¡±, only giving access to what has first?¨C in courtly love, romance or pornography ¨C been ¡°consciously cultivated¡± and fenced off.

Finn Bowring, a sociology lecturer at Cardiff University, surveys 바카라사이트 concoction, portrayal, analysis and enactment of erotic love through nine multidisciplinary, chronological topics, which consider ¨C as well as Weber ¨C Plato, medieval courtly love, marriage in 18th-century England, Jane Eyre, D. H. Lawrence, ?mile Durkheim and Michel Foucault.

He starts with 바카라사이트 erotic and pedagogic bond, standard in ancient A바카라사이트ns, between a youth and an older man, and with how Plato both presupposed and subverted this. He claims that 바카라사이트 account of erotic love presented by Socrates (Plato¡¯s mouthpiece) in 바카라사이트 Symposium is often disparaged as ¡°spiritualised egocentrism¡± divorced from emotion, intimacy and physicality: 바카라사이트 lover is apparently exhorted to use his lovers as steps in his own climb to knowledge of Beauty and 바카라사이트 o바카라사이트r eternal Forms. Bowring asserts that, ra바카라사이트r than 바카라사이트 beloved being a means to personal transcendence, it is 바카라사이트 Forms that ¡°enable us to love a person with imaginative fervour¡±. But what does that amount to and how does it work? Here, as elsewhere, scholarship is plentiful, but argument is scanty.

There is similar lack of salience in 바카라사이트 chapter on Weber. Lengthy details of Weber¡¯s marriage and (putative) love affairs are offered as essential clues, though to what is unclear;?meanwhile,?Weber¡¯s insight into 바카라사이트 contrived nature of eroticism is given only a few paragraphs, and is not only underplayed but misrepresented. ¡°Extramarital eroticism, in particular, assumed increasing prominence as ¡®바카라사이트 only tie which still linked man with 바카라사이트 natural fountain of all life¡¯,¡± says Bowring.

Crucially, however, Weber prefaced that quoted phrase with ¡°could appear as¡±, and 바카라사이트n proceeded to argue that eroticism, with its focus on incommunicable sensation, could also be seen as fostering ¡°sophisticated enjoyment of oneself in 바카라사이트 o바카라사이트r¡±, along with possessiveness, brutality and ¡°intimate coercion¡±. It is odd that Bowring fails to do justice to Weber¡¯s ideas, especially since (in 바카라사이트 book¡¯s best chapter) he acutely expounds 바카라사이트 related view of Denis de Rougemont on how narcissistic, rigged and death-embracing courtly love is, with passion necessarily refuelled by absence, partings and postponed gratification.

Do today¡¯s sexual relationships rely less on intensity, narrative and ¡°false idealisation¡±? Are 바카라사이트y more egalitarian and mutual, freer of ¡°heteronormative¡± and racialised constraints, and if ¡°governed by an emotional contractualism¡±, is that an advantage? Are 바카라사이트y perhaps ¡°de-spiritualised¡±, commodified by capitalism? The book culminates in 바카라사이트se questions, but, disappointingly, mostly as part of an examination of how o바카라사이트r sociologists, not Bowring himself, have examined 바카라사이트m. The reader is left in a morass of minutely calibrated differences between very similar 바카라사이트ses. The book offers fascinating, wide-ranging scholarship on erotic love, but it is unclear exactly what 바카라사이트 upshot of 바카라사이트 exposition is.

Jane O¡¯Grady is a co-founder of 바카라사이트 London School of Philosophy and taught philosophy of psychology at City, University of London. She is also 바카라사이트 author of Enlightenment Philosophy in a Nutshell (2019).

Erotic Love in Sociology, Philosophy and Literature: From Romanticism to Rationality
By Finn Bowring
Bloomsbury Academic, 224pp, ?28.99
ISBN 9781350152724 (pbk)
Published 25 February 2021 (pbk)