The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures

by Timothy Laurie, Hannah Stark

Overview

The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures explores stories about love that recuperate a vision of intimate life as a resource for creating bonds beyond heterosexual coupledom. This book offers a variety of ethical frames through which to understand changing definitions of love, intimacy, and interdependency in the context of struggles for marriage equality and the increasing recognition of post-nuclear forms of kinship and care. It commits to these post-nuclear arrangements, while pushing beyond the false choice between a politics of collective action and the celebration of deeply personal and incommunicable pleasures. In exploring the vicissitudes of love across contemporary philosophy, politics, film, new media, and literature, The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures develops an original post-sentimental concept of love as a way to explain emergent intimacies and affiliations beyond the binary couple.

This book will appeal to academics and postgraduate students across the humanities and social sciences, as well as being a teachable resource for undergraduate students. It will appeal to a wide range of academics and students in literary and film studies, philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, and critical and cultural studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030715557
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	341 KB

About the Author

Timothy Laurie is a Lecturer in Communications at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and the Managing Editor of Continuum: Journal of Media&Cultural Studies. His core research fields include cultural theory, studies in popular culture, gender and sexuality studies, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In collaboration with investigators at the University of Sydney, he is currently working on a three-year research project entitled ‘Australian Boys: Beyond the Boy Problem’ funded by the Australian Research Council.

Hannah Stark is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Her research interests include feminist and queer theory, philosophies of love, autotheory, the nonhuman turn, cultural engagements with extinction, and the emergence of the Anthropocene as a key conceptual framework. She is the author of Feminist Theory After Deleuze (2016), and the co-editor of Deleuze and the Non/Human(2015) and Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene (2016). She is currently working on a project funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘Beyond Extinction: Reconstructing the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) Archive’.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Ideal Love and its Alternatives.- Chapter 3: Singledom in the Future Tense: Lobster, Unicorn, Horse.- Chapter 4: Coupling Anyway: Love as Becoming.- Chapter 5: The Limits of Love: On Forgiveness.- Chapter 6: Conclusion: Toward a Post-Sentimental Concept of Love.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The Theory of Love offers a lucid, engaging, and thought-rich meditation on its topic. Adopting an affirmative though by no means uncritical stance, its authors explore how love is being reimagined in art, politics, and philosophy. What, they ask, might a post-sentimental idea of love look like?” (Rita Felski, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia)

“The Theory of Love by Laurie and Stark offers a fantastic tour of contemporary ideas about relationships covering the good, the bad and the lovely. Offering love as a form of invention, this book proposes that it is less of a feeling than an orientation. Original and illuminating.” (Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender and English at Columbia University)

“Bringing together highly original cultural materials with diverse theories, the authors present readers with tools for creative worlding practices – a ‘becoming sensitive’ to realms outside our own frames of reference. This fine text is destined to become a touchtone for twenty-first century political praxis.” (Chantelle Gray, Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy, North-West University, South Africa)