Beyond Romance

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Beyond Romance

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M. C. Dillon - Author

Price: $95.00
Hardcover - 208 pages

Release Date: October 2001

ISBN10: 0-7914-5097-X
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-5097-0

Price: $32.95
Paperback - 208 pages

Release Date: October 2001

ISBN10: 0-7914-5098-8
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-5098-7

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Summary

Critiques the predominant romantic ideal.

“In Beyond Romance, M.C. Dillon offers a passionate, intimate, and wide-ranging exploration into the nature of love and loving, and examines the central place of sexual love in the meaningfulness of our lives. As a distinguished philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, he indicts the pursuit of romantic love as an idealized illusion that is ultimately blind to truth, beauty, and genuine love. With remarkable skill, he draws deeply on philosophy, on psychoanalytic theory, and includes a bold, at times startling, look at real life in our times.” — Robert Alan Glick, M.D., Columbia University

Beyond Romance critiques the romantic ideal that predominates contemporary thought and practice—it defines, explores, and advocates authentic love as a preferable alternative. The author claims that you can't genuinely love a person you don't know, and that the quality of love depends on the quality and extent of the knowing. Drawing heavily from the work of Merleau-Ponty, Dillon also takes up the classical treatments of love from Plato to the present, emphasizing Hegel, Freud, Sartre, and Derrida. Dillon argues that much of contemporary erotic malaise is traceable to the flaws in the romantic model, and that authentic love addresses these mistakes and promises relief.

“Dillon articulates the Western understanding of sexuality in relation to its dominant dualistic philosophical and theological heritage and stimulates thought about the consequences for an understanding of a sexuality broken free of that heritage. He has brought a distinctive contribution to the overlap between philosophy and cultural studies. --Thomas W. Busch, author of Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation: Essays in Late Existentialism

“The book makes a contribution to a long, if marginalized, tradition of philosophical reflection on the positive relation between carnal knowledge and the good life. It is an original contribution to articulating the implications of Merleau-Ponty's sort of understanding of embodying for intimate relations and ethics. --Agnes B. Curry, Fordham University

M. C. Dillon is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University. He is the author of Semiological Reductionism: A Critique of the Deconstructionist Movement in Postmodern Thought and the editor of Merleau-Ponty Vivant, published by SUNY Press, as well as the author of Merleau-Ponty's Ontology and the editor of Écart & Differance: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Names of Love

2. Aletheia, Poiesis, and Eros: Truth and Untruth in the Poetic Construction of Love

3. Natural Law and Sexual Morality

4. Sexlove: Marginality and Rectitude

5. Romantic Love

6. Virtual Bodies / Bodies of Flesh

7. Motherlove and Sexlove

8. Sex Objects and Sexual Objectification: Demonization and Decontextualization

9. The Flesh of Love

Conclusion: Practical Implications

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Related Subjects

Continental Philosophy
Human Sexuality

39824/39825(JFB/LDS/)

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