This panel explores the relation between the idea of love, broadly conceived, and the practices and logics of Critical Theory equally broadly conceived. For philosophers, love perhaps needs no introduction—it is an ancient presence and disruptive presence that has both required and inspired critique. Literature and philosophy, one might further say, seem to have organized as disciplines around the practice of applying the Apollonian strictures of perfection and rigor to the anarchic and Dionysian force of eros. Philosophy’s birth, coeval with Diotima’s Ladder of Love, has brought into the world a plurality of conceptual hierarchies of the sort that it has been the business of critical theory to sort out, analyze, and formalize; the novel, at least, has its foundations in the notion of the Bildungsroman, a narrative structure that often imagines education and love as coterminous. This panel seeks to ground these longer traditions in a critical history of the present. Recognizing that Frankfurt Critical theory was born out of a union of the Freudian concept of eros and Marxian social critique, this panel seeks to think about the long tradition of pairing an interpretation of desire to a concept of truth, and to analyze what our practices of hermeneutic and rational analysis still have to say about the mauietic model of learning. It seeks further to think through how the ascription of “rational” and “irrational” dimensions of love serves to define how experiences, emotions, and prohibitions on love are inscribed in literature and law, politics and identities, bodies and the mind. If Feuerbach in many ways initiated the tradition of critical theory by redefining Christianity in terms of a material concept of love, so this panel, grounded in the presidental theme of “Being Human,” seeks to present papers involving how the concepts of eros, reason and sociality are mutually constituted anchorpoints of the human condition. Papers will consider phenomenology and psychoanalysis, literature and justice, praise and denunciation, gender identity and intersectionality, racial prejudice as forms of love and hate, analyzing how truth and resistance are shaped by the definition of subjective and objective desire.

The topic responds to recent scholarship on the Frankfurt School that has developed critical theory's relations to questions of selfhood and autonomy (Oberle, Shuster), to modes of ethical truth (Freyenhagen, Hammer), to questions of art and aesthetics (Gordon, Zuidervart, Hullot-Kentor), but also brings things back to basics. The idea of love has indeed been neglected in critical theory for some time because it often disappears behind metatheoretical considerations of the divine, of writing, or of disciplinarity. This panel has tightly grouped papers that will be precirculated in such a way that the organizer will ask that they directly address one another and conform to the narrow time limits of 15-17 minutes that allow for a comprehensive discussion.

The four papers address various aspect of the love-knowledge nexus. Oberle's paper deals with questions of love and objectivity, focusing on the ancient and medieval traditions of an objective order and its relation to Horkheimer's idea of a Enlightenment "copernican turn" in the definition of love. Angermann's paper relates Adorno's critique of Kierkegaard to Iris Murdoch's assertion that ethics must serve as a guide to metaphysics as well as vice versa, and he uses this reading to rethink the depiction of existentialism as a form of self-choosing. Wallace's paper puts Rita Felski's critique of the limits of theory into dialogue with the poetics of Elizabeth Bishop and the queer theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in ways that speak directly to Oberle and Angermann's critique of the erotic selfhood in critical theory. Finally, Gelikman's paper explores Marcuse and Adorno's writings for an analysis of whether the traditionally tight linkage between sexuality, pleasure and truth might not undermine the theory of autonomy and subjective fulfillment that is often ideologically maintained. Together, these papers present a full nouvelle Symposium on the topic of love and its relation to the pleasures and perils of critical reading and argumentation.