The Paradox of Love
Pascal Bruckner
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0691149143
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The sexual revolution is justly celebrated for the freedoms it brought--birth control, the decriminalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce, greater equality between the sexes, women's massive entry into the workforce, and more tolerance of homosexuality. But as Pascal Bruckner, one of France's leading writers, argues in this lively and provocative reflection on the contradictions of modern love, our new freedoms have also brought new burdens and rules--without, however, wiping out the old rules, emotions, desires, and arrangements: the couple, marriage, jealousy, the demand for fidelity, the war between constancy and inconstancy. It is no wonder that love, sex, and relationships today are so confusing, so difficult, and so paradoxical.
Drawing on history, politics, psychology, literature, pop culture, and current events, this book--a best seller in France--exposes and dissects these paradoxes. With his customary brilliance and wit, Bruckner traces the roots of sexual liberation back to the Enlightenment in order to explain love's supreme paradox, epitomized by the 1960s oxymoron of "free love": the tension between freedom, which separates, and love, which attaches. Ashamed that our sex lives fail to live up to such liberated ideals, we have traded neuroses of repression for neuroses of inadequacy, and we overcompensate: "Our parents lied about their morality," Bruckner writes, but "we lie about our immorality."
Mixing irony and optimism, Bruckner argues that, when it comes to love, we should side neither with the revolutionaries nor the reactionaries. Rather, taking love and ourselves as we are, we should realize that love makes no progress and that its messiness, surprises, and paradoxes are not merely the sources of its pain--but also of its pleasure and glory.
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their joy in furtive contact, the whirlwind of rendezvous. Although they generally settle down before they’re fifty, they have the feeling, justified or not, that they have lived better than most people. They like the perfume of love more than people, they are happy buccaneers who exhibit their trophies to attract others. Their calculated nonchalance protects them: no affront knocks them out of the saddle, they merely attack again. Whereas the lover stammers, the seducer swaggers: he shows off
compensate for moral injuries. Thus the prenuptial contract used in America among well-off people has at least the virtue of making things clear: by setting in advance the amount of the indemnities that the wealthier partner will pay his or her spouse in the event that they separate, it avoids mixing genres, the parasiting of the heart.5 Love interrogates, like a sphinx. Beneath the calm appearance, behind the smiles, it launches a constant investigation. Like police officers, lovers are
Engels to twentieth- century theoreticians (Bertrand Russell, Léon Blum), the love-marriage presented itself as the solution to 86 ♥ C ha p t e r 4 the two plagues constituted by adultery and prostitution. Combined with social revolution, associating freedom with attraction, it was supposed to change the face of humanity. In France, two names are prominent in this admirable defense of sentiment: Denis de Rougemont and André Breton. On the one hand, the great Swiss historian, hailed by
abstain from desire itself.8 Virginity was not only a state undergone but also a chosen conquest. One was not born a virgin, one became a virgin by rejecting the corruption of this world and substituting for the purity of the body, an attribute of young women, a perpetual and irrevocable purity of soul open to both sexes. Today, chastity is instead a reaction to the obligation to achieve orgasm that is hammered into us day and night. Hedonism, which used to be subversive, has become the norm, and
might be only a stratagem used by the libido to get itself going again: a strange telescoping of two adversaries, asceticism reinventing precious prohibitions in order to generate precious delights. In our time, what is truly feared is not turpitude but purely and simply the bankruptcy of Eros. How many men Toward a Bankruptcy of Eros? ♥ 169 retreat before the demands of their companions, claiming in their turn to have a headache, faking orgasm in order to get it over with more quickly,
