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What does it mean to love? Does love complete us, giving us purpose and meaning? Or does it tie us down and even harm us? Is erotic desire complicit in oppression, or could it deliver liberation? Are our desires extricable from the wrongs of our societies? And in today’s world, is love still worth the trouble?
This book develops a critical theory of sexual love and friendship, offering profound new ways to understand the troublesome nature of eros. Federica Gregoratto explores the ambivalence of erotic love, which is at once intimately interwoven with heterosexism, racism, and neoliberal capitalism yet entices us with the tantalizing possibility of transformation. Drawing on a rich array of sources—from Frankfurt School critical theory to feminist thought and contemporary philosophies of emotions and affects, as well as poetry, novels, films, and music—she argues that love provides unexpected resources for political agency, resistance, and emancipation. Gregoratto makes a passionate defense of erotic freedom as an adventurous process through which we understand, together with others, who we are and who we want to become, both in our individual existences and in our social lives. Wide-ranging and daring, Love Troubles invites us to reflect on our fraught amorous experiences, showing why we should cherish and learn from them.
— Choice
We love love. And fear love, despise it, and need it more and more. The ambiguities and ambivalences of erotic love are the spur and substance of Federica Gregoratto’s luminous and absorbing work. Love, she argues, is the exemplary social bond stretching from intimate erotic encounters, enveloping friendships, and political solidarity. Love Troubles is also the most readable philosophical book I have encountered in living memory.
— J. M. Bernstein, The New School for Social Research
Critical theory has diagnosed love’s expression of individual and social pathologies. Now Gregoratto challenges it to clarify whether love’s trouble is worth the trouble? Through her question, "when is love unfree?", she shows how freedom coalesces, non-instrumentally, through multiple forms of socially transformative love: from sexual love through inchoate friendship to fraught political activism.
— Penelope Deutscher, author of Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason
Gregoratto's fascinating reflection on erotic love not only gives a detailed account of our contemporary experiences and distress in love, it also brilliantly shows that in this feeling lie, despite everything, powerful critical resources against our capitalist form of life. A much-needed book in our difficult times.
— Estelle Ferrarese, author of The Fragility of Concern for Others: Adorno and the Ethics of Care
Federica Gregoratto navigates the economic, gender, and racial barriers that prevent us from experiencing erotic love as an extension of our social freedom. Love Troubles is a profound and in-depth exploration of the current state of sexual love with the normative intent to liberate us from ideological misconceptions, outdated norms, and social barriers.
— Axel Honneth, author of The Working Sovereign: Labour and Democratic Citizenship
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Troubles We Desire
1. Some Kinda Love: A (Provisional) Map
2. “He Has Kissed Her with His Freedom”: Bound by Ambivalence
Excursus: Why Erotic Love?
3. The Mess We Are In: Toward a Critical Theory of Love
4. Avalanche: Erotic Emotions and Affects
5. Joy as an Act of Resistance: Erotic Education
Notes
Bibliography
Index