The activity of Plato’s Symposium may seem strange to many modern readers—or enviable, depending on your idea of a good time. Gathering on the occasion of Agathon’s triumph at the dramatic festivals, the men give speeches in praise of Eros, the god of love and desire. The speeches begin relatively theologically. The first elaborates the divine attributes of Eros; the second distinguishes between its “vulgar” and “heavenly” forms. Another offers an origin story of human desire, explaining it as the outcome of a divine response to human hubris. Praise of the god becomes an exploration of what love is: how to imagine Eros as both a divine being and a human experience.
Federica Gregoratto’s Love Troubles: A Philosophy of Eros suggests that a modern version of Plato’s Symposium might be less concerned with praise of Eros and more concerned with whether love is worthy of praise at all. We might imagine speeches concerned with how love tortures, twists, ruins, and constrains: how it can feel good for a time but so quickly spoil, or spoil other goods as it captures our time, attention, agency, and aims. As if in response to the party at Agathon’s, the modern voices might lament that whatever love is, it bestows its blessings unevenly. We suffer in its grasp, and we suffer from the pretenses it gives to those who would like us to remain in place. Many of us might be kept from its true goods because of the social conditions in which we find ourselves. It’s hard to praise love when we are kept from loving well, whether by the distortions of capitalism, oppressive norms of gender and sexuality, the burdens of caregiving, or other damaging social contexts and constraints.
What should this modern symposium, considering these conditions, say about love? Having described the problems, what can we ask next? Love Troubles takes up this project in an argument for understanding love as an “ambivalent social bond,” one “that can both enslave and liberate us” (2). Love is not to be praised without concern for what makes it hard to love well and hard to live well in love. But it is also not to be abandoned. Love might still be worth it, not least because “eros itself harbor[s] a potential for resisting oppression, and for opening up possibilities for personal and social transformation” (2). Love has its troubles, but we shouldn’t give up.
I learned a great deal from this book—and enjoyed it very much, especially its lively and insightful readings of many favorite novels and films—but came to wonder if I am not its proper audience. I had imagined I was: I am interested, keenly, in philosophies of eros, and I seem to share with Gregoratto not only a particular taste in books and movies but philosophical temperaments, traditions of inquiry, and many intuitions about what is important, puzzling, and troubling, and what is not. I share her concern for the ways desire can hurt us, and the ways that loving relationships are not immune to the ills of our societies but are inescapably shaped by them. I worry about these issues, often, in philosophical work and in life. Gregoratto’s descriptions of them are compelling and profound. And I share her interest in attending to the ambivalence of eros instead of casting it as either good or bad, an interest surprisingly absent (or repressed) in much of the literature on love.
But Love Troubles is addressed to a reader asking a question I’m not sure I have, though Gregoratto makes a convincing case that many people do. The project is addressed to the person wondering whether love is “still actually worth the trouble” (11) – whether love can be desirable despite how it is shaped by the horrors and constraints of our societies, or whether we have, and should have, fallen out of love with love.
I am drawn to this question because I don’t know if I’ve ever asked as much, or even if I understand exactly what it means. I have wondered whether loving someone or something might be “worth the trouble,” and how that question can be asked coherently. I’ve wondered whether deciding that a love “isn’t worth it” could effectively persuade me not to love that person or thing, or whether it would primarily make me unhappy about a love I continue to have. I have argued that the latter is closer to the case: that if loving this person isn’t “worth the trouble,” I might be able to encourage myself to direct my attention elsewhere, but I have less control over my desires, and may find myself more frustrated through half-heartedness than persuaded by my newfound view. But these are concerns about loving someone or something in particular, whether my spending my time on that person is “worth it,” not whether love itself is worthwhile.
Gregoratto’s concern about love’s troubles is phrased differently, closer to the speeches of the Symposium than the particular loves I may judge particularly worthless. Gregoratto is interested in troubles with what love is, and whether we do and should value it as such. She argues that “what love is” is a difficult and often misleading question, particularly where it tries to escape the social contexts of our experience of love, and where it seeks a definition that categorizes it as good or bad. But she wants “to resist those social diagnoses and observations according to which sexual, passionate, romantic love, as well as friendship, would have lost desirability and value” (11). To argue for the desirability and value of eros, we do need to consider what love is. We just don’t need to resolve whether love is good or bad.
Gregoratto argues for a view of love as ambivalent, not defined by its goodness (or badness) but by dynamics of interpersonal recognition, constrained by social forces but not necessarily doomed by them. Love can constrain us; it can also liberate us. The fact that it can do both—and that we might not know which it will do, at many crucial moments when we might like that knowledge—should not dissuade us from loving or valuing love. The critique of love’s troubles is possible without abandoning love. And it is a task of philosophy, Gregoratto argues, to help us see both what should be torn down and what else is possible. Indeed, it can be a task of love: eros itself is where we can “create spaces for building, educating, and cultivating critical and transformative subjectivities” and attract “public recognition” for liberatory ways of living (179).
“We have entered a phase of deep descriptive and normative uncertainty,” Gregoratto writes. “We are deeply unsure with regard to the goodness and desirability of love, and we struggle to comprehend what love relationships exactly are, or have become, what their constitutive rules are” (11-12).
With such uncertainty, it is easy for many things to go wrong. I can love someone and not be sure how to express that love to them, or whether such an expression is likely to bring pleasure or pain. I can be confused by what social recognition of this experience and expression I should expect: whether it will seem like a good try, or even laudably courageous, to express my love, or inappropriate, unwelcome, even threatening or aggressive. As Adriana Cavarero wrote of violence in the aftermath of 9/11, “Names and concepts, and the material reality they are supposed to designate, lack coherence. …language proves unable to renew itself to name it; indeed, it tends to mask it.”
Our language and norms around love have become incoherent. We struggle to name what we feel, and we struggle to think with the names we have. We lack the language to account for changing expectations of gendered roles in loving relationships, for example, or our feelings of loving people we’ve been taught we shouldn’t love. In their place, we punish each other and ourselves for stepping out of lines we may not think are in the right place, but at least we can see.
And the problem, for Gregoratto, is deeper than language. It is also about the social conditions that make even seemingly good loving relationships unsatisfying, or seem to require one partner (or both) to get a bad deal: to be socially punished, excluded from domains they would like to be a part of, or otherwise constrained by social forces because of a love they otherwise enjoy, that seems otherwise good. Erotic bonds can form badly. They can also form well, but be poisoned by social conditions and constraints.
Both dynamics are part of Gregoratto’s sense of the “ambivalence of eros,” which she describes as “twofold”:
to begin with, if we want to conceptualize the good of love, we cannot do it without taking into account those social, objective social conditions that hinder or enable human flourishing. But a second meaning of love’s ambivalence cuts deeper, on a more general and existential level, and is difficult to dispel: even if we were able to liberate ourselves from damaging social conditions, we would have no guarantee that the troubles of love would be “worth it.” Freedom, in love or otherwise, is not a given, but hard and painful enterprise that does not always succeed (55-56).
I have certainly worried about the ways our social ills make love difficult, even bad. But I struggle with what it might mean to give up on love, to decide that eros itself isn’t worth the trouble. We may not succeed, either in liberating ourselves from damaging social conditions or in loving well as a result of that liberation. But finding love thus undesirable, devaluing love itself: what kind of view, and what kind of life, would that be?
Would devaluing love be a kind of ideal to strive for, however imperfectly? Is it a kind of permission, letting us off the hook when we don’t love, or don’t feel we need love, or don’t want it? I think Gregoratto wants devaluing love to be a kind of siren, alerting us to social ills: an alarm that we don’t have a world that allows for love of desirable kinds, or for love to seem desirable itself. When love seems no longer “worth it,” when it seems desirable to give up on love itself, our society is not well. We need social change, we need the language to name it, and we need norms and practices to critique, reconstruct, and continuously reimagine our collective lives.
The desirability of giving up on love may be also the kind of siren Plato would recognize, a temptation, hard to avoid but worth constraining ourselves against. There are a lot of reasons love seems not “worth the trouble,” worth abandoning wholesale. But it’s not clear what we would or could abandon it for. What life would be possible in the absence of love, having decided love isn’t worth it? We have even fewer words to name this vision, or norms to guide and judge it. Love may be troubling and troublesome, but it’s not clear we can give it up. Instead, we need to hear the want to give it up as a call to change, and guide ourselves—as Gregoratto does—in living through those desires.
