From the rules of courtly love which structured the conquest of love in the Middle Ages to the “swipe” function of Tinder which allows with a gesture of the thumb to “choose” its target as one selects a yogurt in the supermarket, the romantic relationship is perhaps the anthropological dimension that has most fundamentally changed in our modernity. In The end of love (Threshold), the sociologist Eva Illouz describes with great subtlety the new mechanisms of the love market in a capitalist society.
Eva Illouz knows this: in an individualistic society where “freedom of choice” is sacred, any criticism of sexual freedom is immediately reduced to a conservative enterprise. While taking the usual precautions, the sociologist nevertheless deploys in these 350 fascinating pages a rigorous and chilling inventory of the disorders caused by the absence of sexual norms in our society. In the vein of Jean-Claude Michéa, but on your much less controversial and more academic tone, the sociologist, author of a remarkable work on the commodification of emotions ( Happycratie ), notes:If neoliberalism has undoubtedly brought about a disappearance of normativity in economic transactions, one must wonder if economic freedom does not have effects of the same type on intimate relationships ”
Self-centered pleasure, accumulation of experiences, heightened competition, lack of loyalty: the love arena has become a gigantic market.Sexual deregulation (as there is financial deregulation) has brought uncertainty and competition to the heart of the romantic relationship. Self-centered pleasure, accumulation of experiences, heightened competition, lack of loyalty: the love arena has become a gigantic market encouraged by information technologies, advertising devices and the complicity of a fringe of psychology renamed "personal development" . The sociologist, who has conducted dozens of interviews, is particularly interested in the phenomenon of casual sex , or "sexuality with no tomorrow", which she believes has become the paradigm of "no love" characteristic of contemporary romantic relationships.
Freedom to “not choose”
Indeed, if the sexual revolution was made in the name of "choice", it is now the freedom to "not choose" which is today put forward. A refusal of any commitment which leads to the extreme but now banal practice of ghosting (“ghost”, ghost): the fact of interrupting a relationship overnight without giving explanations. Eva Illouz rightly notes that alignment with male sexuality creates great suffering in female subjects where it is a source of regret, even depression: "the correlation between lack of self-esteem and the practice of occasional sexuality is solid " For men, this performance-oriented sexuality also creates immense frustrations that sometimes fuel a transition to violence, as in the “Incels”, these communities of involuntary celibates (“ INvoluntary CELibate ”) who evacuate their resentment in misogyny .
This book, which claims to dispute with psychology its monopoly on the field of the emotions, is the sociological equivalent of Extension of the field of the fight , the masterful novel of Michel Houellebecq published twenty-five years ago, where he described minutely the distress of the sexual loser in the great market of desire. Proof if any that literature is always one step ahead: Houellebecq was treated at the time of "neo-reactionary" for having dared to doubt the benefits of the sexual revolution. The director of studies at EHESS, however, only confirms, in the wake of Me Too, that he was right.
The end of love, Eva Illouz, Seuil, 408p, 22.90e .
threshold