The End of Love. Eva Illouz
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“The libertarian principle of self-ownership says that each person enjoys, over herself and her powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that she has not contracted to supply.”15 More concretely, the libertarian principle of self-ownership includes freedom to have and own one’s feelings and the freedom to own and control one’s body that would later entail the freedom to choose one’s sexual partners and to enter and exit relationships at will. In short, self-ownership includes the conduct of one’s emotional and sexual life from within the space of one’s interiority, without hindrance from the external world, thus letting emotions, desires, or subjectively defined goals determine one’s choices and experiences. Emotional freedom is a particular form of self-ownership in which emotions guide and justify the freedom to have physical contact and sexual relations with a person of one’s emotional choosing. This form of emotional and bodily self-ownership marks the shift to what I suggest calling “emotional modernity.” Emotional modernity was in the making from the eighteenth century onward, but became fully realized after the 1960s in the cultural legitimation of sexual choice based on purely subjective emotional and hedonic grounds and has observed yet a new development with the advent of Internet sexual and romantic apps.
Anthony Giddens was one of the first sociologists to make explicit the nature of emotional modernity, viewing intimacy as the ultimate expression of individuals’ freedom, of his or her progressive unmooring from older frames of religion, tradition, and from marriage as a framework for economic survival.16 For Giddens, individuals have the resources to shape from within themselves the capacity to be autonomous and intimate at once. The price to be paid for this, according to him, is a state of “ontological insecurity,” a permanent anxiety. But on the whole his much-discussed concept of “pure relationship” was a descriptive and normative endorsement of modernity, since it suggested that intimacy enacted the core values of the modern liberal subject as being aware of her and his rights, able to implement these rights, most notably in the capacity to enter and exit close relationships at will through an implicit contract. For Giddens the subject entering the pure relationship is free, knowledgeable about his or her needs, and able to negotiate with another on such needs. The pure relationship was the liberal social contract writ large. In a resonant vein, for Axel Honneth (and Hegel before him), freedom comes to its realization through a relationship to another.17 Freedom is thus the normative ground for love and the family, with the family becoming the very expression of freedom realized in a caring unit. Thus, both Giddens and Honneth complexify the traditional model of liberalism in which the self views the other as an obstacle to one’s freedom: for both thinkers the free self comes to its full realization through love and intimate relationships.
But as this book is set to show, this model of freedom raises new questions. Intimacy is no longer—if it ever was—a process of two fully aware subjects entering a contract the terms of which they both know and agree on. Rather, the very possibility of drawing a contract, of knowing its terms, of knowing and agreeing on the procedures to enforce it has become distressingly elusive. For a contract to be entered into, there must be an agreement on its terms; it presupposes a clearly defined will, aware of what it wants; it entails a procedure to enter into an agreement, and a penalty in case one of the two signatories defaults. Finally, by definition, a contract includes clauses against surprises. These conditions for contract-based relationships are hardly present in contemporary relationships.
The institutionalization of sexual freedom via consumer culture and technology has had an opposite effect: it has made the substance, frame, and goal of sexual and emotional contracts fundamentally uncertain, up for grabs, incessantly contested, making the metaphor of contract highly inadequate to grasp what I call the negative structure of contemporary relationships—the fact that actors do not know how to define, evaluate, or conduct the relationship they enter into according to predictable and stable social scripts. Sexual and emotional freedom have made the very possibility of defining the terms of a relationship into an open-ended question and a problem, at once psychological and sociological. Not contractual logic but a generalized, chronic and structural uncertainty now presides over the formation of sexual or romantic relations. While we have commonly assumed that sexual and emotional freedoms mirror each other, that they sustain and reflect each other, this book casts a doubt on this assumption and begs to suggest that emotional and sexual freedom follow different institutional and sociological paths. Sexual freedom is nowadays a realm of interaction where “things run smoothly”: actors dispose of a large abundance of technological resources and cultural scripts and images to guide their behavior, to find pleasure in an interaction, and to define the boundaries of the interaction. Emotions, however, have become the plane of social experience that “poses a problem,” a realm where confusion, uncertainty, and even chaos reign.
In tackling sexual freedom through the question of the emotional experiences it generates or does not generate, this study hopes to skirt altogether the conservative lament on sexual freedom and the libertarian view that freedom trumps all other values. Instead, it will engage critically with the meaning of emotional and sexual freedom by exploring empirically its impact on social relationships. Whether endorsed or condemned, freedom has an institutional structure, which in turn transforms self-understandings and social relations. This impact must be examined by suspending a priori assumptions about the merits of monogamy, virginity, the nuclear family, of multiple orgasms, and group or casual sex.
The Malaise with a Critique of Freedom
Such inquiry is bound to generate unease or resistance from a number of intellectual quarters. The first comes from sexual libertarians for whom to criticize (sexual) freedom is tantamount to being in a “reactionary phase of hysterical moralism and prudery”—to quote Camille Paglia’s stern condemnation.18 However, this position is itself equivalent to the claim that a critique of economic freedom and deregulation is a return to a hysterical desire to build kolkhozes. The critique of freedom has been the prerogative of conservatives as much as of emancipatory scholars and nothing about it calls for a return to moral prudery, shaming, and double standard. The critical examination of the current state of emotional and sexual freedom is in fact a return to the core questions of classical sociology: What is the fault line between freedom and anomie?19 When does freedom end and amoral chaos start? In that sense, my inquiry about the social and emotional impact of sexual freedom here marks a return to the core of Durkheim’s questions on social order and anomie: I interrogate how the intrusion of capitalism in the private sphere has transformed and disrupted core normative principles of that sphere.
A second objection can come from various academic disciplines such as cultural studies, queer studies, and gender studies that have traditionally been preoccupied with disenfranchisement, thus implicitly or explicitly making freedom the supreme value orienting their scholarship. As Axel Honneth correctly claims: for moderns, freedom trumps most or all values, including equality and justice.20 All in their different styles, libertarian feminists and gay activists (especially the pro-porn activists and scholars), literary scholars and philosophers, have viewed freedom as the most vulnerable of all goods and have thus been reluctant to focus on its pathologies, except when it takes the form of the tired critique of neo-liberalism or when it refers to “narcissism” or “utilitarian hedonism” fostered by the consumer market. To this reluctance one may offer two different types of responses. The first has been very well formulated by Wendy Brown: “Historically, semiotically, and culturally protean, as well as politically elusive, freedom has shown itself to be easily appropriated in liberal regimes for the most cynical and unemancipatory political ends.”21 If that is the case, then freedom is a social arrangement we should always be eager both to preserve and to question. The second response to the objection follows from the first and is methodological. Relying on David Bloor’s principle of symmetry—examining different phenomena in a symmetrical way without presuming to know who is good or bad, victor or loser—we may suggest that freedom should be examined critically in a symmetrical way in both the economic and the interpersonal realms.22 If we, critical scholars, analyze the corrosive effects of freedom in the realm of economic action, there is no reason not to inquire about these effects in the personal, emotional, and sexual realms. The neo-con