Can We Talk about Love?
In what is becoming an annual tradition since it was first taught in 2018, ‘Can we talk about love?’ is a critical attempt to try to have a meaningful conversation about ‘love’. The course tries to look at a wide range of texts encompassing philosophy, psychology, literature, both in Arabic and English to not only understand ‘love’ as phenomenon but to try to develop the terms and the ideas to be able to have such a conversation.
This course was inspired by a reading group spearheaded by a friend on how to come to terms with ideas that are seemingly abstract and yet immediately personal and experienced in our everyday life. In a time when capitalist logic reaches its apex in transforming our bodies, our minds, our ideas, our emotions and our very span of attention into complex modes of objectification and consumption, how can we come to understand concepts like: attraction, attachment, fidelity, amity and care, and so on. This course raises more questions than tries to answer them, and it is entirely premised on the seamless mingling of the intersubjective and the intellectual.
Over the time-frame of the course, participants will continuously oscillate between articulating a subjective experience and ideas and at the same time engaging with a wide variety of texts and media, ranging from St. Augustine to Egyptian “romantic” pocket-book series, Zuhur.
The course’s main objective is part therapeutic, part intellectual exploration and part critical reflection on the possibilities of love in a time and space like ours.
Sessions Outline
Session (1): Beginnings
-Plato’s Symposium, The Cambridge edition, edited by Frisbee C. C. Sheffield
Optional:
-Ch.4 , Part II, in Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, Vol. 1: Plato to Luther
Session (2): Religious and Moral Grounding
-Ch. 2 and 6 in Simon May, Love: A History, Yale University Press, 2011
-Part I and II in Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, Chicago University Press, 1996
Optional Reading: C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, Hartcourt, 1960 (Part III, IV, V, VI) – or
Session (3): The Invention of Romance:
Part I in Irving Singer's The Nature of Love Vol. 2: Courtly and Romantic Love (1984)
Arabic resonances:
نبيل فاروق، النبع الجاف، سلسلة زهور
سلامة موسى، الحب في التاريخ: رأي العرب في الحب، جميل وبثينة، يزيد وحبابة، كثير وعزة، قيس ولبنى، صبيحة وابن أبي عامر، ابن زيدون وولادة
Watch:
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare's Globe Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet (you can turn on the captions, so you are able to follow the text)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=079_iKX9VVI&t=14s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqX2HawwxzI
Optional:
Ch. 8 and 9 in Simon May's Love: A History
Session (4): Arabic-Islamic formulations
-Chapter 33, 'Love in Islamic Philosophy', Ali Altaf Mian, in The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy 2019
-Introduction in Joseph N. Bell’s Love Theory in Later Hanbalite Islam (1978)
طوق الحمامة في الأُلفَةِ والأُلَّاف، لابن حزم: االفصول: 1،4،5،7،14،15،20،21
chapters 1,4,5,7,14,15,20,21
(English translation)
http://www.imagomundi.com.br/espiritualidade/hazm_ring_dove.pdf
Optional:
مصارع العشاق، لأبو جعفر بن محمد
رسالة في ماهية العشق، لابن سينا
Session (5): Love as knowledge
-‘Introduction’ from Irving Singer, ‘Meaning in Life: The Pursuit of Love’, MIT Press, 2010
-Ch. 2, in Harry G. Frankfurt, Reasons for Love (2006)
-Conclusion, from Linnel Secomb, Philosophy and Love: From Plato to Popular Culture, Edinburgh University Press, 2007
Session (6): Modern and Contemporary Iterations: Love under Capitalism
-Ch. 7, ‘The Reasons for Passion’ in Eva Illouz, Consuming Romantic Utopia pp.208-246
-Ch. 3, Romantic Webs in Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism
Optional:
-Chapter 1, ‘Falling In and Out of Love’ from Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love, Polity, 2003
Session (7): Love is just an emotion?
-Chapter 2 "What Emotions are" in Peter Goldie's, "The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration", Oxford University Press, 2002
-Chapter 4, 'Explaining Emotions', from Amelie O. Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotion, University of California Press, 1980
Session (8): What Can Science Tell Us?
Watch:
A Neuroscience Love Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbFchFe1Nfo
Your Brain in Love and Lust - by Scientific American
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4NfXEuF_cs
What is Love? - SciShow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrR-6Vwle1I
-Wendy Suzuki, Lecture on The Neurobiology of Love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4lgvxjSVXw&t=50s
-Readings: S. Zeki, The Neurobiology of Love
Optional Reading: Chapter 2: Gravitation is not responsible for People Falling in Love from Berit Brogaard, ‘On Romantic Love: Simple Truth about a Complex Emotion’, Oxford University Press, 2015
Session (9): Love and the question of the ethical
-Love, Ethics and Responsibility (from Linnell Secomb, Philosophy and Love)
-Ch.7 in Troy Jollimore, Love's Vision (2011)
Optional:
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Love:
