Real Love: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Religion, Society

This is the third book in a series of psychoanalytic "interventions" into culture and society (the first book was an intervention into American sociological theory, and the second was an intervention into American gender theory). Real Love explores today's diverse, multiplicitous, and contradictory modalities of love through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalytic sociology. It is careful to avoid the temptation to locate love exclusively within the register of human meaning or desire by striving to locate the traumatic "being" of love. The implications are such that love is today the least of possibilities: those who fall in love increasingly do so with a high degree of certainty and conviction. Yet, given that, love finally emerges as an interruption of the tendency that we often have to place the pursuit of happiness, career success, and spiritual/mental growth in the foreground. It is within this context that love can once again become dangerous and revolutionary.