Session 2: Large Comparisons on Intimacy
Chair: Rachel Waterstradt

The Historicity of Love's Bond
Christopher Grau
Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

In this paper I will offer a defense and elaboration of some ideas that first appeared in Robert Kraut’s essay “Love De Re.” In that underappreciated paper Kraut offers a discussion of love and reference that is helpful because it clarifies the way in which love is fundamentally an historical notion. Kraut argues that our attachment to the beloved has a “rigid” dimension in the sense introduced by Saul Kripke in his discussion of the reference of proper names. The “rigid designation” of such names brings with it the consequence that reference does not transfer to relevantly similar objects – i.e., it is not determined by whether a given object possesses some set of appropriate properties. Similarly, love’s”rigid” bond is such that it is not transferable to a relevantly similar object – i.e., it tracks a particular historical individual, not any such creature who happens to possess a given set of qualities. Genuine love for Liberace is no more transferable to (even a first-rate) impersonator than the name “Liberace” refers to any individual who happens to have a certain set of characteristics (e.g. mediocre musical ability, flamboyant fashion sense, etc.). Improper accounts of love and of reference both often fail to take account of the historicity of the bond in question. In the case of love, the causal history of the individual is crucially relevant, for it is this history that individuates the beloved in a way that (often) makes him or her irreplaceable to the lover. I will build on Kraut’s analysis and argue that our essentially backwards-looking concern with the history of an individual is critical to a proper understanding of love’s bond. In the process I’ll be criticizing the supposedly “historical” accounts of love offered by Amelie Rorty and Hugh LaFollette. 

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Eros in Chains: Rethinking the Politics of Intimacy, Love and Sexual Behaviour from Marcuse to Contemporary Immunitarian Paradigms
Cinzia Romagnoli
Institute for Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences, University of Urbino, Italy

Core theme of this paper is the conceptual survey – from the perspective of social and political philosophy – of the relationship existing between power and intimate life, with a special attention to modern and postmodern political devices, practises and discourses conceived to rule the erotical and emotional sphere.
The paper will thus focus on some of the most influencial theories of continental and feminist philosophy of the second half of the XX century which have analitically defined the terms of the problem.
The aim of the paper is the rethinking of those theories in order to find out some strong hermeneutical outlines for an understanding of the relation between power and eros (both as sexual behaviour and emotional desire towards happiness) in the present time. It is almost universally ascertained that the social and symbolical changes due to the globalization process also deeply influence the nature, quality, structure and frequence of human identities and relations, not least of inner self-awareness and of intimate interpersonal bonds (Giddens, Bauman, Butler).
Therefore, from Marcuse’s theory of erotical repression in civilized societies, through Foucault’s microphysics of power and genealogy of knowledge as well as through the radical feminist critic of the patriarchal and male-centrated roots of western culture (Irigaray, Kristeva, Rubin, Haraway), up to recent developments of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics (Agamben, Nancy, Esposito, Perniola) I will then interpret the three main tendencies of our time partly as radicalizations of modern age contradictions partly as completely new events: 
1) On the one side, through medical and psychological discourses power is more and more widely and deeply binded with intimate life as “biopolitics”, as “power to preserve life”, immunizing life itself from its subversive elements;
2) On the other side, in appearance opposite to the previous tendency, since when “culture” and “religion” have once more become the core themes of politics, both lay and religious institutions enter more and more openly and aggressively in intimacy spaces;
3)  Last but not least, “industry of desire”, both as industry of eros and main psychological motive of consumer economies and mass politics, changes persons from producers into consumers, commercializing emotions and intimacy itself in every field of social life (Hochschild).