Rifare (al)l'amore Frammenti di filosofia, critica sociale, psicoanalisi

The essay explores some ways in which philosophy can become part of a practice of social critique by attempting to speak about (erotic) love. This is a practice that gives up on the obsession with stable, univocal answers, and that seeks to stay with the troubles of love, dwelling in erotic ambivalences and even failures. On the one hand, the doubts and uncertainties fracturing our affective lives are effects of systems of oppression; on the other, they compel us to ask crucial questions about what we desire, who we are, and how we wish to live and become. And troubles might push us to face the fears and risks implied in experiences of transformation. Philosophy and critical theory draw thus closer to certain insights of (Freudian) psychoanalysis. The essay revisits (without thematizing though) a particular model of philosophy introduced by Plato in the Symposium, as well as some of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic intuitions in his reading of the text. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Audre Lorde,

and Judith Butler, it does moreover decisively inflect such trajectories with a feminist-theoretical perspective. [Publisher's Text]