1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910865287403321

Autore

Castelli Alberto

Titolo

A Love for Nothingness, A Love for Death : The Metaphysics of Desire / / by Alberto Castelli

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Singapore : , : Springer Nature Singapore : , : Imprint : Springer, , 2024

ISBN

9789819730360

9789819730353

Edizione

[1st ed. 2024.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (175 pages)

Disciplina

152.401

Soggetti

Emotions (Philosophy)

Philosophical anthropology

Philosophy of mind

Ethics

Philosophy of feelings

Philosophy of Anthropology

Moral Psychology

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations -- Preface -- A Love that Kills: The Idiot -- Isabel Archer: A Case for Female Masochist Tendencies -- Romantic Agony: Young Werther and Jacopo Ortis -- Bipolarism in the Nineteenth Century Novel -- Women of Modernism -- The Love Song of the Underground Men -- The Unbearable Lightness of Providence -- Orphans of Love -- Afterword -- Endnotes -- Biography -- Index.

Sommario/riassunto

This book aims at explaining romantic love between straight adults through literary texts of the western canon from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Each chapter comes with a multidisciplinary approach in which protagonists are mutilated in their quest for loving as alternative to annihilation. The book emphasizes love as an obsession, thus as an exploration of the mind. From the passion-myth of Tristan and Isolde to the nihilist modernist representations, the western world has created a perverse concept of love. A love for nothingness, for death. Narcissistic and at times destructive, love is



gained by overcoming obstacles. If without obstacles there is no love, then love becomes love for obstacles. Within this masochistic frame, love, falling in love, being loved always stand at the edge of pathology. At its core this book narrates a love story, more precisely a story of loves, the haunting evocation of a desire that by its very nature cannot be fulfilled. Inherent in the nature of love is a subtle dialectical activity between presence and absence, between creation and destruction, reality and void. Accordingly, the narrative raises questions that the past two centuries were incapable of answering. Does love only last the time of a kiss? Is its promise fatally destined to dissolve? What about violence? Physical, emotional, temporal. Is it an ineliminable part of love or its most extreme profanation? And what is the mystery that accompanies loves that know how to last without resigning themselves to the death of desire? It is to answer some of these questions that I wrote this text. Love is an unconscious process that dominates reason and destroys it when reason cannot be a mode of communication. Hence, the amorous romance is madness and this text is written as a loud reminder. Endorsement A unique and surprising book about love. A book that goes against the grain, offering the reader an evocative feeling of suspension between desire and the uncertainty of its fulfilment. A daring book whose reading is a must because it offers a new perspective not yet encountered elsewhere. Barbara Sonzogni - Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.