A Love for Nothingness, A Love for Death

Meer over het boek

This book explores romantic love among straight adults through literary texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each chapter employs a multidisciplinary approach, depicting protagonists who are often mutilated in their pursuit of love as an alternative to annihilation. Love is framed as an obsession and a mental exploration. From the passion-myth of Tristan and Isolde to nihilist modernist representations, the western narrative has cultivated a perverse concept of love—one that often veers towards nothingness and death. Love, characterized by narcissism and destructiveness, is achieved through overcoming obstacles. If love requires obstacles, it becomes an affection for those very challenges. Within this masochistic framework, love, falling in love, and being loved teeter on the edge of pathology. The book narrates a story of loves, evoking a desire that is inherently unfulfilling. It examines the dialectical interplay between presence and absence, creation and destruction, reality and void. The narrative poses questions that have lingered unanswered for two centuries: Does love endure only for the duration of a kiss? Is its promise doomed to dissolve? Is violence—physical, emotional, temporal—an inescapable aspect of love? What mysteries allow some loves to endure without succumbing to the death of desire? This text seeks to address these questions, presenting love as an unconscious process that often overwhelms re