In Defense of Love
An Argument
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler comes a stirring manifesto on love in the modern age.
Who wrote the book of love?
In an impassioned polemic, Ron Rosenbaum—who has written books on the mysteries of Hitler’s evil, the magic of Shakespeare’s words, and the terrifying power of thermonuclear explosions—takes on perhaps his greatest challenge: the nature of love. Rosenbaum argues that what we know as love is imperiled now by the quantifiers, the digitizers, and their algorithms, who all seek to reduce love to electrical, chemical, and mathematical formulas.
Rosenbaum brings excitement to his thinking as he interrogates the neuroscience of love, with its “trait constellations,” and the efforts of others to turn all human lovers into numerical configurations. He asks us why our culture has become so obsessed with codifying and quantifying love through algorithms. The very capacity that makes us human, Rosenbaum argues, is being taken over by numerical methods of explanation.
In Defense of Love is more than an examination of the intersection of love with literature and science. It is a celebration of the persistence of a mysterious and uncanny phenomenon: the inexorable power of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Rosenbaum (Explaining Hitler) contends in this impassioned offering that "love is in trouble" from those who reduce it to a mere scientific or literary object. Defending love as an experiential phenomenon, Rosenbaum criticizes its misrepresentations, including the neuroscientific notion that love can be "mapped" in the brain ("locating these regions tells us nothing about love," he writes about one such study, "unless they are prepping to do mini-emotional lobotomies"), and the idea that love is a "drive" similar to hunger or thirst. He also devotes a chapter to Leo Tolstoy, who late in his career wrote a trilogy of novellas that betrays a clear disdain of love. In The Kreutzer Sonata, for example, Tolstoy describes carnal love as "shameful" and purports humanity would be better off extinct than engaging in it. But Rosenbaum's most convincing defense of love comes through earnest renderings of his own relationships and losses ("I can't deny that for years afterward the memory of the song kept our love alive," he writes of a past flame. "What will survive of us... sometimes just an old song"). Such recollections powerfully illustrate what is perhaps the work's most resonant point: "The only thing one can learn while being in love is how little one knows about love." Even staunch skeptics will have their heartstrings tugged.
