The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations

Описание

contrary, some relationships fade or evaporate before or soon after
they properly started, while others end with slow and
incomprehensible death.3 And yet, “unloving” means a great deal
from a sociological perspective as it is about the unmaking of social
bonds, which, since Émile Durkheim’s seminal Suicide,
4 we have to
understand as perhaps the central topic of sociological inquiry. But in
networked modernity, anomie—the breakdown of social relationships
and social solidarity—does not primarily take the form of alienation
or loneliness. On the contrary, the unmaking of bonds that are close
and intimate (in potentiality or in reality) seems to be deeply
connected to the increase of social networks, real or virtual, to
technology, and to a formidable economic machinery of advicegiving or help-giving. Psychologists of all persuasions—as well as
talk-show hosts, pornography and sex toy industries, the self-help
industry, shopping and consumer venues—all of these cater to the
perpetual process of making and unmaking social bonds. If sociology
has traditionally framed anomie as the result of isolation and the lack
of proper membership to community or religion,5
it now must account
for a more elusive property of social bonds in hyperconnective
modernity: their volatility despite and through intense social
networks, technology, and consumption. This book inquires into the
cultural and social conditions that explain what has become an
ordinary feature of sexual and romantic relations: leaving them.
“Unloving” is the privileged terrain to understand how the intersection
between capitalism, sexuality, gender relations, and technology
generates a new form of (non) sociality.
Psychologists have been entrusted with the task of repairing,
shaping, and guiding our sexual and romantic life. While they have
been, on the whole, remarkably successful in convincing us that their
verbal and emotional techniques can help us live better lives, they
have produced little or no understanding of what plagues our
romantic lives collectively. Surely the myriad stories heard in the
privacy of psychological consultation have a recurring structure and
common themes that transcend the particularity of their tellers. It is

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