Generally, men
and women bind themselves driven by what they name love. Creative and identity-renewing exaltation, a revolutionary force that suddenly makes the insipidness of one’s life visible, love
is a profound emotion. The transition from love to loving, from love as pure
emotion to active love in a relationship, marks the difference between
yesterday’s lovers and today’s lovers, over time and in societies, highlighting the social form of intimacy.
What, then, is the “form” of contemporary love? Do the risks that characterize
today’s intimate life mean that love has now
become emptied of meaning, sucked into the semantic code of a “light”
and “inconsistent” love, as Bauman seems to want? Or is there another
interpretative possibility, on the line that runs from Luhmann to Giddens up to
Beck? Paradoxically, is it perhaps that love seems to have no meaning because
it has “too much” meaning? In the framework of the relationship between Systems Theory and Intimacy Sociology, the paper addresses these questions, revisiting
to this purpose, the
morphogenesis of love in the transition from solidarity without choice to
solidarity without consent.
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