I’m just leaving love study hall. First time back here in quite a while. It’s nice, really nice, to be in conversation and with thinkers about love. It was just me communing with a text, The Logical Structure of Love, and my memory, reading bell hooks (of course), listening to Loretta J. Ross teach us about radical love as a liberatory path of transformation (she said it better, with less drama and more specificity, but I can’t remember what it was she said), also reading bit of bell hooks’ All About Love out loud to friends and study hall mates.
So, The Logical Structure of Love, is a master’s thesis, that I found online and am re-reading.
The author, accepting bell hooks ’ conception of love (in All About Love) as primarily a practice (vs a feeling or a thing that can be given, received or taken away) goes on to examine bell hooks’ claim that “Love and abuse cannot coexist”, by doing so arrives at a logical structure of love.
I think it’s pretty readable and I find it really helpful to my journey of breaking down unexamined ideas about relationships, to see them for what they are and what they do.
The focus of the paper is on intimate partner abuse, and it resonates, for me, in all relationships.
Here are a few words by the author introducing the paper and its purpose —
This, then, is the goal of this thesis: to articulate a conception of love that better serves the goal of liberating us from oppression, intimate and otherwise. Love is not a concept which should oppress, and yet everywhere one looks, it does. It is consistently used to justify and normalise cruelty, and it should not be so easy to do this. From hooks’ statement of incompatibility, I derive the implied oppositionality – that love is the opposite of abuse – as the starting axiom of a wholly different route to conceptualising love. In clarifying abuse, I believe we can clarify love. In clarifying love, we can clarify abuse. And in clarifying their oppositional character, I believe we can take a step towards the realisation of a mutualistic and liberatory human intimacy.
“Love and abuse cannot coexist.” This is the clarity bell hooks brought to the question of love. This is the clarity I wish to try to extend. — The Logical Structure of Love by Andy Connors, Master of Arts (Philosophy) Research Thesis The University of Melbourne, 2017, p.8.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it up, but the plan is to hold love study hall at 4pm ET on Wednesdays, for a 50-minute hour. The time might change. For now, reading through the paper is my first order of business. love business.
If you feel like joining me, you can read your love text. or enjoy the quiet to do, or not-do, something else…
