Eva Illouz is familiar with emotional worlds – and that makes the professor thoughtful and critical.
Photo: Imago/DTS news agency
The Israeli-French sociologist Eva Illouz was nominated for the most important cultural award of Israel. Education Minister Yoav Kisch has now withdrawn the nomination. The professor is accused of having signed a petition to the International Criminal Court in the Hague in 2021, in which 180 scientists, politicians and artists asked the ICC not to rely on Israel’s authorities when investigating war crimes in Gaza, East Jerusalem and West Bank.
All you need is love-the Beatles announced it to a huge community, in 1967, in the very first television live broadcast. Many believed in it, believe in it today. Again and again the love of world -changing, even redeeming quality, is being attached. Such a view is just as popular for Eva Illouz as it is wrong. The sociologist, which is teaching in Jerusalem and Paris, takes feelings seriously; In their view, they make a lot more out of people than orthodox representatives of science.
Feelings are complex and contradictory, often give little reason to romance. For example, envy. Who has not already felt the lives of others as a desirable than their own – but also made it small. Eva Illouz, 1961 in Fès, Morocco, born, indicates investigations by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who show how people imitate the lifestyles of others to increase their reputation. From which it can be seen: the emotional life is only supposedly private, it always takes place in social contexts.
In order to sketch what enormous role it has always played for the genus man to work through the emotions, Eva Illouz takes the reader on excursions through cultural history. Although, surprising for a thinker, literary works serve as essential sources – and just not philosophical writings. This resembles the procedure of the extremely clever Berlin scholar Klaus Heinrich (1927–2020), who repeatedly criticized the guild of the philosophers and scientists, to whom he himself criticized, to adjust the exact view of the real with a mummy hill of the highly compressed, abstract terms.
What we have reached at »Madame Bovary«, Gustave Flauber’s Rome Commercialist from the 19th century, the interpretation of which takes a wide range of wide space in Eva Illouz’s new book. The title heroine, young and attractive, lives in the French province. The pharmacist with whom she is married and who loves her intimately can in no way satisfy her hunger for more shine in life, which is why she plunges into secret affairs with privileged or privileged men. What the author draws on is the sources of the longings of this woman, namely kitschy love novels, women’s magazines, advertising with her assembled images and formulas.
Another chapter deals with Annie Ernaux, whose almost entire work circles her origin from a poor family of the so -called lower class. Even when the French writer has become a widely recognized author, she still feels a deeply fitting class shame. As with her, for Madame Bovary: The ideas about what makes a livable life often take over to the valuation standards of others who are a gateway in the soul. With far -reaching consequences. Whole industries, to alleviate such strong emotions as disappointed expectation or shame, produce an unmanageable range of products – our feelings feed capitalism. Only the consumer world, as Eva Illouz writes, arouses needs that it cannot satisfy.
The resulting, as it were, as it were, disappointed, as it were, many people of the existing society put a burden. Increased by social media, in which an imposed collective excitement is permanent, this steadily growing feeling of disappointment now decides elections.
Even more dramatic the chapter on fear. According to Eva Illouz, this is part of the basic equipment of the escape animal, is a reaction to a perceived threat. Because fear of your own vulnerability ceases to show you, this emotion entirely pushes thinking back. Some historians see state formation as a attempt to contain fear for hundreds of years. The community grants the individual protection and also limits the exercise of violence among its members, thus eliminating the sources of fear.
But fear never stopped. And is often instrumentalized by politicians – also in liberal societies. In the 1950s, republican circles in the United States specifically fueled the fear of “threatening” Soviet communism and massively restricted the bourgeois freedom with the consent of parts of the highly staggered population for supposed security reasons.
According to the Israeli author’s conclusion, the feeling of fear always offers advantages to a right -wing policy. Because this is based on the idea of a world divided into friends and enemies; It promises maximum preference for the own group and a maximum elimination of the enemies. What obviously attracts people much more and again than a liberal, that is, enlightened society. Whose ideal it is to free the world from fear of making social coexistence without fear through knowledge of the actual nature of the world.
What does all of this follow? Perhaps the book by Eva Illouz best unfolds its qualities if you do not take it as one about any subject examined by any scientific means, but as a view of the mirror. Then the readers would always be meant by what the author explains. For example in the beautiful passage about Heinrich von Kleist’s novella “Michael Kohlhaas”. The more their hero gets into his initially justified anger, the more he loses what literary figures and human living beings make most interesting, says Eva Illouz, namely “the ability to reflect on himself, to question, move and weigh up the principles of their actions.”
If these sentences were really heart, the self -righteousness radically from the fishing, of which so many people are determined in this country. That would be a step that leads out of the universe defendant social misery.
Eva Illouz: Explosive modernity. A. d. Engl. V. Michael Adrian. Suhrkamp, 447 pages, born, € 32.