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4 Love Introduction I liked Heaven and Earth and Alexander for their tenderness. I dedicated both to my mother for that reason.1 With the exception of U Turn, all of my films have an aura of optimism about them. In World Trade Center it is feelings of family that help pull the people out of the hole. In W. Laura Bush is a binding force. In Wall Street love is also important. U Turn demonstrates the problem of isolation.2 In the opening scenes of Salvador (1986), Richard Boyle (James Woods) is arrested for multiple traffic offences and then bailed by his friend
With the enormous span of time embedded in the very grain of the celluloid, old films and footage touch, in a sensate way, the strange and familiar longing for the archaic past which lies at the heart of the modern dilemma. Walter Benjamin‘s suggestion - that when delving into the secrets of modernity, including its technology, the archaic is never that far off - grows palpable when watching film from the archives. This project could just be called, ‘Why do we love old movies?’ To begin to grasp how old films touch us, its instructive to look at how technology functions within films. The power of degraded technology to create intimacy does not go unnoticed by filmmakers today where its use extends from the avant-garde to popular cinema. To further understand such effects, this paper focuses on one way technology provokes intimacy: how people fall in love in the movies.
This book explores the work of Luce Irigaray, one of the most influential and controversial figures in feminist thought—although Irigaray herself disclaims the term ‘feminism’. Irigaray's work stands at the intersection of contemporary debates concerned with culture, gender and religion, but her ideas have not yet been presented in a comprehensive way from the perspective of religious studies. The book examines the development of religious themes from Irigaray's initial work, Speculum of the Other Woman, in which she rejects traditional forms of western religions, to her more recent explorations of eastern religions. Irigaray's ideas on love, the divine, an ethics of sexual difference and normative heterosexuality are analysed. These analyses are placed in the context of the reception of Irigaray's work by secular feminists such as Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Elizabeth Grosz, as well as by feminists in religious studies such as Pamela Sue Anderson, Ellen Armour, Amy Hollywood and Grace Jantzen. Most of these thinkers reject Irigaray's proposals for women's adoption of gender-specific qualities as a form of gender essentialism. Finally, Irigaray's own spiritual path, which has been influenced by eastern religions, specifically the disciplines of yoga and tantra in Hinduism and Buddhism, is evaluated in the light of recent theoretical developments in orientalism and postcolonialism.
Smith explores how Stoker‘s novel raises some complex questions about love through its use of a male love-struck narrator, who appears to be caught in a Female Gothic plot which casts him as its hero. In the novel ‘love’ becomes increasingly sinister as it turns into a destabilising and dangerously irrational emotion that ultimately aligns love with feelings of justified horror. Jewel (1903, revised 1912) thus develops a male reading of a Female Gothic plot in which the idea of female empowerment becomes defined as horrific. However, this idea of a pathologised love, Smith argues, is not unique to Stoker and can be linked to Freud‘s account of love, which reveals how issues relating to male authority appear within psychoanalytical debates about emotion at the time.
Ch a pter 2 LOVE’S DIM ENSIONS a tribe in northern Pakistan, it is rumored that the most powerful love potion you can get is water that’s been used to wash the body of a dead leatherworker. In Swedish folklore, to capture your crush’s attention, you should carry an apple in your armpit for a day—and then present it, bathed in your own special scent, at an opportune romantic moment. Since Roman times, at least, a long list of weird tinctures and funny foodstuffs have been thought to stimulate lust, love, and good relationships. Sometimes love doesn’t just happen
C h a p t e r 12 CHOOSIN G LOVE you are probably at least open to the idea of love drugs playing a role in our society. But you might also worry that something special about love would be lost in the process. Part of the magic of love, it seems, is precisely that it is so mysterious—that it can take us over completely, as though by a force outside ourselves. Do we really want to put it under a microscope, much less douse it with a bunch of chemicals from a lab? As Wordsworth wrote in the “The Tables Turned,” “Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous
On 7 September 2014, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the right-wing Hindu body, widely regarded as the parent organisation of Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party of India, published cover stories on ‘love jihad’ in its weekly mouthpieces Panchjanya , in Hindi, and Organiser , in English. ‘Love jihad’ was alleged to be a conspiracy under which Muslim men were targeting vulnerable Hindu girls and forcefully converting them to Islam by feigning love through trickery and marriage. The publications urged people to raise the slogan ‘Love ever
This book is about abundant, generous, other-regarding love. In the history of Western ideas of love, such a configuration has been inseparable from our ideas about divinity and the sacred, often reserved only for God and rarely thought of as a human achievement. The book is a substantial engagement with Cixous's philosophies of love, inviting the reader to reflect on the conditions of subjectivity that just might open us to something like a divine love of the other. It follows this thread in this genealogy of abundant love: the thread that connects the subject of love from fifth-century-
Love stories 4 The Lovers (1970), Sadie, It’s Cold Outside (1975) and Wide-Eyed and Legless (1993) The two situation comedies and one play analysed in this chapter are about love, romance and marriage. The generic differences between The Lovers and Sadie, It’s Cold Outside on the one hand, and Wide-Eyed and Legless on the other, are matched by the different kinds of relationship represented in each. The comically unresolved courtship of the young protagonists in The Lovers, set at a moment at the end of the 1960s when it seemed that ‘the Permissive Society’ had
Is there a pill for love? What about an anti-love drug, to help you get over your ex? This book argues that certain psychoactive substances, including MDMA—the active ingredient in Ecstasy—might help ordinary couples work through relationship difficulties and strengthen their connection. Others may help sever emotional ties during a breakup, with transformative implications for how we think about love. Oxford ethicists Julian Savulescu and Brian D. Earp build a case for conducting research into "love drugs" and "anti-love drugs" and explore their ethical implications for individuals and society. Why are we still in the dark about the effects of common medications on romantic partnerships? How can we overhaul scientific research norms to put interpersonal factors front and center? Biochemical interventions into love and relationships are not some far-off speculation. Our most intimate connections are already being influenced by drugs we ingest for other purposes. Controlled studies are already underway to see whether artificial brain chemicals might enhance couples' therapy. And conservative religious groups are already experimenting with certain medications to quash romantic desires—and even the urge to masturbate—among children and vulnerable sexual minorities. Simply put, the horse has bolted. Where it runs is up to us. Love is the Drug arms readers with the latest scientific knowledge as well as a set of ethical tools that you can use to decide for yourself if these sorts of medications should be a part of our society. Or whether a chemical romance might be right for you.