Faculty Writing: On the Future of Sex, Foucault, and Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Love

Anjuli Raza Kolb edited a series of essays on Emily Witt’s book Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love for Public Books in which the authors wrestle with Witt’s smart, wry, and sometimes menacing explorations of free love, non-monogamy, and the social and economic forces that shape our intimacies.

” The essays below wrestle with Witt’s smart, wry, and sometimes menacing explorations of free love, non-monogamy, and the social and economic forces that shape our intimacies. They revisit the utopian strains in Witt’s book from the other side of a great catastrophe of public life in the US to push even further the forms of radical intimacy that now, once again, feel urgent and necessary.”

Samantha Hill wrote a piece on Hannah Arendt for Open Democracy in which she explores Arendt’s conception of love in and out of politics.

“Readers looking to Arendt’s Amor Mundi for a form of political love might at first be disappointed. Amor Mundi—love of the world—is not love in any sense we’re commonly used to. There is, however, a challenge to think about what it means to be committed to the world, to care for the world despite its horrors. There is a provocation to embrace one another in our difference and to meet one another as fellow human beings. There is also a radical critique to be found of more common forms of love, which are destructive of difference and plurality.”

Finally, Anthony Alessandrini penned a review of Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi’s Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment in the latest issue of the Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World.