 This time of year, we commemorate the execution of a Christian man who allegedly had the ability to cure blindness and spread love amongst men. If you're thinking, wasn't Jesus crucified sometime in the springtime, you got the wrong guy. I'm talking about St. Valentine. Love has been used to form a nation. Love has been used to form a religious practice as a doctrine. Love has formed to have set rules and regulations. Love mirrors cultural norms, cultures, and also molds it and it goes back and forth. In a society that is much more individualistic, where the principle of authenticity plays a much bigger role. So people have been excluded from love relationships, from sexual relationships, all throughout human history, but who is being excluded has drastically changed. Dating apps are not geared toward finding fulfilling relationships. Their goal is to keep up engagement. The goal for the dating apps is, of course, not love, but profit. What is the true love? Because there exist many versions of love. So what is the true one? Happy Valentine's Day and welcome to Standard Time, a Euro-Zine production. This is mainly a talk show with guests from all over Europe, but today we're also a dating advice column. But unlike WikiHow, we don't offer a 20 plus surefire signs to know if a person truly loves you. We do, however, hope to offer you a perspective on affection in a consumerist society. A do-it-yourself toolkit for understanding love. This is nice, isn't it? I'm Mereca King-Up-Up, editor-in-chief of Euro-Zine, the magazine presenting this show. We are also a co-founder of Display Europe. Today I'm taking you on a journey of introspection to answer humankind's impossible question. What is love? It's a tough one, so take your time, and since this is a digital production, you get to have plenty of it in your respective Standard Time. In the meantime, check out Display Europe, a platform offering you content in 15 languages from all over Europe. Some say it began with the Romans, some with the Middle Ages. Despite the unknown origins of Valentine's Day celebrations, one thing remains true. Historical traditions looked nothing like today's commodity extravaganza. And we can blame the Hallmark Company for that. Not only do they produce the cheesiest Christmas movies about high school sweethearts and women abandoning careers, they also were the pioneers of the commercialization of this very celebration with their Valentine's Day card industry taking off in 1913. Later followed by the chocolate, flour, jewelry industries in the mid-80s. So the next time you get in trouble for forgetting to buy a gift for your significant others, you can blame consumer capitalism for it. Some local variations still persist around Valentine's Day. I, for instance, always do a stand-up show on this day, but globalized cultural exports have impacted most of today's traditions. Our perspective on romantic relationships is changing, as the ways we express love across cultures begin to fade in favor of Western and patriarchal norms. Owing to digitalization, dating as we know it began to take a different shape with the new generations, as young people open up to ideas of fluidity, non-restrictive commitments, and open communication. Falling in love is anyway so old-school, Genziers are showing us how to lend softly amidst an anxious society to be able to take care of one another. But of course, not everything is covered in glitter and consensual group hugs, while generations of rainbow kids and feminists struggle to reform relationships to be more equal and inclusive. Some people, mostly straight-right men, are very upset about this, blaming these changing standards for their loneliness. Lovelessness and a growing resentment has produced a toxic online culture based on misogyny, where aggressive, pumped-up alpha males and grumbling in-cells both agreed that women are the ultimate problem. Now, for the record, they're wrong. However, at the root of this phenomenon are very important things which merit more than a sarcastic laster, and that's what we will talk about today. So, what is love? And why is headway so petrified to be heard by it? If love is pain, why do we all seem to want it? Where is it on sale and which branch should we choose? Our guests are here to help answer those age-old questions. Faris Kuchigezagan is an intersectional LGBTQIA activist, performance artist and Ethiopian queer knowledge and culture producer. They are the co-founder of House of Gouramele and the vice-chair of Afro Rainbow Austria, the first organization established by and for African LGBTQIA communities in Austria. Karin Franzen is a professor of comparative literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University since 2020. In her research, she investigates the history of subjectivity in pre-modern as well as modern and contemporary European literature and deals with formations of subjectivity. She has published on medieval and early modern female writers' appropriations of subject positions in the traditions of courtly love. And here to talk with us about involuntarily celibacy, Lea Jure Ritterfeld is a PhD student of philosophy at the University of Vienna. She's working on racialization, resentment and love from an epistemic perspective. Very welcome and thank you for coming on the show. Today we talk about love, so let's start with the popular and especially a commercial understanding of love. Can I ask you, Karin, to historicize our current notions of love? I would like to think that love is, on the one hand, a power, a force, an emotion that transcends social orders. And on the other, it's a very malleable, adaptable thing that every society can use in order to create the culture that society strives for. In antiquity you have, for example, Plato's Symposium, which is regarded as one very important text where love is represented. The core in that text, in Plato's text dialogue, is that love is the kind of, you lack something. For example, you can feel that if you find someone you love, you find the hope of yourself, you find your other, so to speak. I think it's still a very common way of defining love. The other source in Western histories, Kotli love, it's emerging during the Middle Ages in the 11th century around there. And the cultural, the Kotli culture and so on was not so developed. And I think Kotli love, they used love as an ennobling force. So you could use love to civilize drives, civilized violence, civilized forces of different kind. For example, rape was the more usual way to get a woman, but with Kotli love seduction, well postponement of the desire, postponement of the sexual acts was included in the culture. The one is lack, the other is a kind of sublimation of aggressivity, sublimation of violence. And of course, during modernity, they form literature culture in Western culture. But during the 17th century, you can feel a kind of change, which is also a kind of social change. So when the individual becomes a very important notion in modernity, the conception of love also changes. Nowadays, and it started already, I think, during the Enlightenment, during the 18th century, the ideal of equality or equity. The idea of union, the idea of equality in love is also a very important way of conceiving love in modernity. As you say, love is this very malleable concept, even our understanding of the place of love changes very rapidly as well. For instance, in the past, say 200 years, the understanding of love and marriage and their relationship transformed significantly, and this is an ongoing process. However, a lot of people tend to be left out of these mainstream understandings, either punished for their experience of love or their requirements for love, or just completely forgotten. Who are we forgetting here, which is probably the majority of society? Yes. Please broaden our perspective here, Fadis. Love has been used to form a nation. Love has been used to form a religious practice as a doctrine. Love has formed to have set rules and regulations and selectivity who get to enter into that love and who doesn't get to enter into that love. In any form that is really stepping away from that is really pushed away from such understanding of love. For me, love is a human experience, but not all humans get to experience it. Bodies that are black, indigenous, bodies that are disabled, bodies that are practiced, love outside of these are very heteronormative definitions of or practice of love. Bodies that are existing in a very expansive nature of gender outside of this binary understanding of gender. Anybody that is outside of these definitions or bodies that are trying to define themselves with their own terms that is not considered to be in these rules and regulations, those are the bodies that are really not included in these definitions of love. Or incentivized, I mean, let's be honest. Incentivized, yes. This is not just a heteronormative, still very heteronormative society, even in the luckiest places on earth, but also very domestic ones. So, family subsidies, tax cuts, subsidized housing, etc., in any kind of other partnership with someone else, I don't have access to these things. Yeah. That's why it's, you know, the capital aspect of it comes in, right? There are form of loves that are also considered to be outside of the heteronormativity, but it's still implementing the normativities, and that is also being seen and rewarded. And then also that is being limited to a certain bodies as well, again. Throughout all these doctrines and throughout all of these rules and regulations that are being engineered, the minute you're not practicing love in a way that really contributes and maintains this hydromanic force, the minute you're stepping away, your access to the capital, your access to the safety, your access to celebration, your access to be seen as a whole human being would be chipped, you know, get chipped away. I think it's very important that you say that there is this normativity to our understanding of love, and those who don't confirm to certain benchmarks immediately have a harder time. I would argue though that even those who do meet these benchmarks oftentimes are not very well off. Yeah. And now we land on the problem of involuntary celibacy and this whole culture that has built up around this, basically mostly straight-right men's experience of not being wanted or not finding a partner to couple up with, and all the resentment around this. Can you tell us about this, please? Because by the looks of it, it's not working very well for straight-right men either. Which is, this was supposed to benefit them, wasn't it? This was supposed to be heaven for them. We seem to be in the middle of a shift. Love mirrors cultural norms, cultures, and also molds it, and it goes back and forth. In a society that is much more individualistic where the principle of authenticity plays a much bigger role. So people have been excluded from love relationships, from sexual relationships, all throughout human history, but who is being excluded has drastically changed and the criteria for exclusion have changed. The judgment related to this exclusion as well. There are more spaces for certain people who feel excluded and also to find one another. At a certain time you had to marry because otherwise you would not be able to survive. And now living in a pretty prosperous state, it is possible to find different loving relationships and to also focus more on the authentic self and then hopefully find somebody that appreciates that authentic self and whose authentic self one appreciates as well. So we see different groups who express frustrations about being excluded from romantic and sexual relationships and one of the notorious examples of such a group is the in-cell community who have found an online space to share these grievances and who radicalize into very extreme forms of aggression and self-hate, suicidality, misogyny, racism, etc. Because love at least the way it is conceptualized in the current society seems to be the end goal and it gives a lot of the other things that we do its final cause, its final reason. So some people who are for whatever reason convinced that they will never be able to have such an experience of love feel like the current society cannot offer them anything that they are unwanted. And now a word from today's sponsor Otto von Bismarck, the plush otter. He supplies the show with cuddles and unconditional fuzz on stressful production days. Thank you Otto von Bismarck. You can also become a supporter of the show and you don't even have to snuggle me. All I ask is that you pledge your support at patreon.com slash Eurozine, that is Eurozine, the magazine presenting this show. You can pledge as little as five euros a month or whatever you can afford and I promise you won't buy clothes for Otto von Bismarck from it. Instead you'll get access to bonus materials, invitations to the taping of the show and even get to submit topics and questions. Thank you and now get back to the show. Dating for the majority of time can be really annoying. Much of it is trial and error and those errors can be very sensitive things and it can be so disappointing and so tender. So I think with the frustration part we can, you know, I would wholeheartedly emphasize this has to do both with the culture of finding a companion but also as you say, our expectations of love. You must expect all your personal needs fulfilled by love which is insane. That's not possible. I don't know of a romantic partner who can do that or seven. For me it's also like, you know, we don't have to love but we choose to love, right? Like, you know, there's sexual liberations and also like, you know, to choose someone to be with you or like, you know, to be with somebody else. Probably people make a decision, a financial decision. People make a security decision. And this is still a great driver of people staying in violent relationships even in the best of times that they sometimes can't afford to not be part of a couple and not be in a relationship because they can't afford housing. We don't seem to have good cultural rules for these negotiations which seem very far from the romantic ideal but are desperately needed when we talk about consent and participation and being present and it seems to me that the insult community takes issue or they have a problem with needing negotiations. I think that would be rather difficult to answer because the community is so diverse. So surely you will have people who reject negotiations although I think that is probably not the most defining trait of the community. Surely there are individuals who would like to go back to the 1950s where you had very clear roles and they felt that if they as a man could economically provide sufficiently for a family they would be guaranteed to have a loving sexual relationship with family, somebody who cares for them, etc. I think that the community is much more diverse than we often think. They are often considered to be aggressive misogynistic white cis males so some of these empirical assumptions have been proven to be wrong. About 50% of them identify as non-white. There is a proportion of them who don't identify as straight. There are some who have left who have said that they have figured out that they are queer which explains things that they first thought was an in-cell ideology but now actually makes much more sense in other categories. I think that the main problem that they are facing is that they are convinced that because of certain bodily or emotional or psychological criteria they will never be able to engage in what we currently see as the most important part of a successful and beautiful life which is having a loving or a love relationship and this is much more clear now with dating apps where people swipe left and right and make split second decisions and there are many people who just after years of trying feel like this will never work, I will never be able to change this and then basically give up on life and all the things that follow whether it is self-hatred or resentment towards women towards whatever group that they see as somehow being responsible usually society as a whole. Dating apps are not geared toward finding fulfilling relationships. In most cases, especially when we are talking about the major ones their goal is to keep up engagement but I do understand why this feels like this is going to be a judgment about one's person. Eva Illouche has done very interesting studies on how capitalists have changed the emotional patterns in modern society or in late modern society of today and most of all that love has become a kind of commodity on a global market or a rest market in any case. The goal for the dating apps is of course not love but profit. That's a very sad side of it. And if it is a commodity then we might feel like okay I just need to do a few things so that I can acquire this commodity and I kind of expect or demand to receive this commodity So my research looks at it as kind of a virtue that you should foster so it is more about how can I practice loving instead of demanding to be love and we see this in the incels it's very interesting the demand to be love without trying to do the difficult part which is the lovingly attending. I would like to challenge that because for me I don't think love is becoming a commodity Love exists in its expansive natures but the systematic natures of capitalism is coming and then making a profit out of it. I want to keep the integrity of the love. So for me it's really hard to just give all that up these expansive natures of being and experiencing and being part of a human that we call love as fully to call it a commodity. In my experience as a queer body people threaten to kill me because they have so much love for the God that they believe and my manifestations is a disrespect for that God so they will do anything for that love to the point to kill me. I would argue that sometimes that's not love that's conforming to an ideal Yes, a love that is miseducated, misinformed and manipulated which is the conforming part aspect of it. That's a really interesting interpretation which would make sense of a lot of things so I don't know if you've seen the movie Napoleon that was in the cinemas the past few weeks. No, but my 12 year old did see it at school for some reason and I'm going to have a couple of words with her history teacher. Wonderful, two and a half hours of war and slaughter it was not my cup of tea. Yeah, and a lot of debauchery sex as well which supposedly were kind of fast forwarded even better. But I thought in some strange sense it is a movie about love because it is the love for the nation the love for the military and the love for a specific person of Napoleon so these three forms of love because if you see love as being entirely motivated to further the flourishing of the object of your love and promote their interests and their well-being and protect them from harm, you will do a lot. I think actually in the ancient Greeks had like eight or nine different words for love all of them pointing to different aspects of what we now somehow try to summarize with love which is difficult to talk about. This is love, this is not love. I think that kind of discussion has also been going on for a very, very long time. There exist a lot of discussions literary, philosophical, theological discussions about what is the true love because there exist many versions of love so what is the true one? That's a great thing with love. It's bigger than us and we try to use it in different ways and that kind of putting it to use reflects our culture our timely way of negotiating and handling the forces that makes up the culture and the forces that we are. And now let me introduce today's host, the Esther Foundation's library here in Vienna in the 10th district. This is the knowledge hive serving both the research needs of scientific communities and the general public. You can come in, get a library card for yourself, check it out. Thank you, Esther Stiftung Library. I started my early life out with a very sort of romantic ideal about love as deep dedication, love conquering all, listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing about. He's careless about me, I don't think he tries but once in a while he will hug me and smile and I was there like, oh my world, that must be it. And then I was tending to this tiny, tiny human whose behavior toward me, especially as a toddler was atrocious like children or essentially, you know, horrific. You could not have a more narcissistic loving relationship. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's when I realized this kind of dedication of putting up with anything and loving despite all that, that's not supposed to be with an equal partner, that's supposed to be with a dependent. To a certain degree level, it's like, you know, your artist kind of also goes into the definitions, my definitions of what love is because you have an intention for it and you're following up with the actions of like, you know, of nourishing the spritz and the physical aspect of your child. You are like, you know, obligating yourself. You are disciplining yourself to fulfill that. But I really do think that this kind of love is also something that you learn. This is not something inherent that you're born with. Your capacity for it is. Yeah. But the ways we love and how we offer non-transactional love to others who are not going to, I don't expect the children I care for to repay me. That would be horrific. Yeah. I want them to, you know, pay this forward to whoever they choose and however they wish. Yeah. But this is supposed to be kind of an economy of benevolence where we all put something into the pot and expect something in return but not the exact same. That's why it's an intention in an act because it's like you would have an intention and you need to follow it with an action. When we are talking about self-love, like, I always understand it's self in a very collective way. Like, you know, I might probably, you might probably see me as an individual, but I'm also literally a collection of my, like, at the end of my ancestors and my parents and all of that. And also, but also on a spiritual aspect of it, I'm also a collection of memories and like, you know, all of these systems within myself that are working together and pouring into functions as one. When you're trying to love yourself, the majority of the time you are probably working with nettingness. And that nettingness might probably be seen as a delusional things that you are doing. And I really, like, you know, I refuse, I'm going to remain delusional and really work on that conjuring of knowledge and really, like, you know, and then really create something that I can touch that is tangible for me. I think, because you were speaking about care, caring, dispassionately, disinterestedly in the sense of not just from my own interests, for the interests of the object of love is, for me, one of the fundamental aspects of love with its different facets that we talked about. I would go the absolute opposite path, I think, if I understood you correctly and saying that love should move you away from delusions in the sense that if you love and you see loving as a certain form of attention, a very close attention towards the other person then you manage to see them really for how they are and to the extent that you are mistaken or are stuck in delusions about that person. Like, the world that we're living is constructed in a way that really makes us to see love in a very transactional way, in a very capitalistic way of this kind of things. And when I say delusion, that's what I meant. You choose to view it otherwise, basically, right? I wouldn't call you delusional. I would say that you strategically choose to be optimistic, which is one of my favorite expressions. You refuse to see gloom and doom around us, right? Yes. When I was talking about, like, you know, to conjure the capacity to love ourselves and that capacity, when we compare and contrast to the reality of existing in the world now, some aspect of it might probably sound unrealistic. You are, quote-unquote, born with a capacity for love, but you don't come into this world with the knowledge and an understanding and the mechanism for love. Oh, that's quite beautiful. I have teenagers. I'm transforming them from unconditional love to something to give back. It might teach you more than reading a lot of books. I think, like you said, we are born with certain predispositions, just like we are born with the predisposition to see moral values and act ethically, morally, but that doesn't mean we know exactly how to do this and it doesn't mean that this process ever ends. Instead, you can foster virtues your entire life and the more you do, the more virtuous you become. So I think it is very intriguing and beautiful to see love as a certain form of moral activity, a certain form of attention towards an individual other, which is something that we need to foster to learn throughout our lives and might be more beneficial and more helpful to think of love as something that you want to foster instead of something you expect or feel entitled to have or hope that one day will fall into your lap. Thank you so much. Thank you all for participating as just like a closing idea. I would throw in there that this capacity of ours for love, I would so love for it to not be taken for granted. Everybody who works with children as a pedagogue or everybody who raises them as a family member in each shape or form, please don't assume that they're going to learn it somehow. It's not quite that easy and we would save them so much figuring out if we very intentionally were present in their lives and guiding them through this process. I'm one of those parents who is not terrified of learning that their children are horrible people. I'm terrified of them being horrible people so I would rather assume that it's my job to avoid this. I would also really encourage people to really also raise the inner child in them. Oh, indeed. Yeah. So it's like that practice of love is the learning. That's why I call it also a technology and it's like when we talk about children, we have so many, so many, we have a child in us that we really need to learn and to grow and to be nurtured as well. I agree. I think also that to be open towards the thing in you and in the other that you don't know, I think that's a very important thing and I think that love has the power to open us up towards this kind of uncanny, unknown dimension of life of yourself and the other instead of this idea of controlling and having what's in it for me, you know, what's in it for me. Thank you so much everyone for taking the time and joining us today. Happy Valentine's Day. However you want to celebrate. I don't celebrate Valentine's Day. I celebrate with pickles. This talk show is a Display Europe production. Display Europe is a new content sharing platform where you can find content on politics, culture, community and so much more across 15 European languages. 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