Desire For Love

"There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory," writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories - especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what a person is and how her history should be read. At the same time, other modes of explanation have been offered by popular and mass culture. In these domains, sexual desire is not deemed the core story of life; it is mixed up with romance, a particular version of the story of love. In this small theoretical novella-cum-dictionary entry, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child structure so central to psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality of context, environment, and history. The entry on Love describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives. Whether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is deemed always an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no love. Desire/Love takes us on a tour of all of the things that sentence might mean.

This is a story about Gianni, a man whose mission was to lead a simple lifestyle of finding love and getting married and starting a family. He wanted to live out this dream he had since he was in his late teens, and he endured many obstacles over the years to get to where he felt he needed to reach his goal. This story takes place over many years of his life and covers his many different trials and tribulations while growing up from a shy kid to a confident adult. It also covers the reasons he goes through his struggles of finding love and how he tried to lead the simple life and the examples of what he did to maintain the simple lifestyle. Sometimes it was a completely innocent encounter, but nothing was simple for Gianni because no matter where he went, trouble would begin for him. Many times, his friends would be surprised or shocked by these encounters with women even though they would see it happen in front of their own eyes, but the person who was most often surprised was Gianni himself. Because he had many different encounters and circumstances with women that were beyond his control, the dream that he had envisioned was altered and led him to live a completely opposite lifestyle that he was seeking. Not only did he have many different encounters with women in his life, but these encounters would also happen to him anywhere he would be. And it did not matter what his age was, whether he was a teenager or when he was already in his forties. Once he started into the opposite lifestyle, could he turn back in time to reverse course and accomplish his original mission?

Nautilus Award Gold Medal Winner, Ecology & Environment In Matter and Desire, internationally renowned biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber rewrites ecology as a tender practice of forging relationships, of yearning for connections, and of expressing these desires through our bodies. Being alive is an erotic process--constantly transforming the self through contact with others, desiring ever more life. In clever and surprising ways, Weber recognizes that love--the impulse to establish connections, to intermingle, to weave our existence poetically together with that of other beings--is a foundational principle of reality. The fact that we disregard this principle lies at the core of a global crisis of meaning that plays out in the avalanche of species loss and in our belief that the world is a dead mechanism controlled through economic efficiency. Although rooted in scientific observation, Matter and Desire becomes a tender philosophy for the Anthropocene, a "poetic materialism," that closes the gap between mind and matter. Ultimately, Weber discovers, in order to save life on Earth--and our own meaningful existence as human beings--we must learn to love.

This wonderfully small, thick book--like a box of photos--is divided up into the following categories: bonds (between partners and family members), icons (say, Jane Fonda as Barbarella), observations of glimpsed love or lust, come-ons to further naughtiness, tokens (mostly flowers juxtaposed with women), libidos (lusty acts), reveries (erotica), and obsessions (the sexual unusual). The international array of photographers includes Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Helmut Newton, Sally Mann, Immogen Cunningham, Brassai, and Julia Margaret Cameron. After a lengthy introduction on the history of photography and desire, there's nothing but photos there-on-in. You might just get aroused, or fascinated as to how others are aroused, or intrigued as to how far people go to arouse others. Ewing is director of the Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

An engaging and accessible introduction to the subject, this text explores love and sex as defining features of our identity. Through thirty-nine classic and contemporary articles, as well as original contributions written by emerging voices in the field, Desire, Love, and Identity covers awide range of topics, such as sexual objectification, the ethics of sex work, love and sex online, friendship, polyamory, and BDSM.

He knows how to score …on the field and in the bedroom. But Alex Dare isn’t prepared for the injury that sidelines him into early retirement. Still, if it means working closely with the one woman who ever meant more to him than a one night stand, he’s all on board. But there is no amount of wealth or charm that could persuade social worker, Madison Evans, back into Alex's bed. Good thing Alex loves a challenge. But soon seducing Madison becomes more than just a goal, it just might define his future.

Are you frustrated by stymied relationships, missed connections, and the loneliness of the search for someone to spend the rest of your life with? Are you ready, instead, to find “The One”? In Calling in “The One,” Katherine Woodward Thomas shares her own personal experience to show women that in order to find the relationship that will last a lifetime, you have to be truly open and ready to create a loving, committed, romantic union. Calling in “The One” shows you how. Based on the Law of Attraction, which is the concept that we can only attract what we’re ready to receive, the provocative yet simple seven-week program in Calling in “The One” prepares you to bring forth the love you seek. For each of the 49 days of Thomas’s thoughtful and life-affirming plan, there is a daily lesson, a corresponding practice, and instruction for putting that lesson into action in your life. Meditation, visualization, and journaling exercises will gently lead you to recognize the obstacles on your path to love and provide ways to steer around them. At the end of those 49 days, you will be in the ideal emotional state to go out into the world and find “The One.” An inspirational approach that offers a radical new philosophy on relationships, Calling in “The One” is your guide to finding the love you seek.

In the light of poststructuralist theory, and with reference to the work of Lacan and Derrida in particular, Catherine Belsey argues that fiction - including poetry, drama and film - is paradoxically the most serious location of writing about desire in Western cultura. Beginning with the celebration of true love in contemporary popular romance, and the reluctant scepticism of postmodern novels, she goes on to explore past representation of passion by Chretien de Troyes, Malory, Spenser, Donne, Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Tennyson and Bram Stoker. Belsey also discusses the role of desire in the utopian writings of Plato, More and William Morris, as well as its treatment by a range of speculative feminists, from Charlotte perkins Gilman to Marge Piercy.