Paraules d’Amor

The list of Western cultural representations about love and passion is endless: from Greek mythology and its tragedies, to Christian scholasticism, courtly love, the Golden Age, the romanticism of the 18th and part of the 19th centuries, all the way up to the most popular or alternative cultural expressions of our time. Each has borne witness to the ravages caused by ideals of love.

On the level of reality, we continue to suffer the believers who exterminate others in the name of the love of a God; the nationalists who continue to throw themselves into mutual destruction for the love of some fatherland or motherland; the teenagers who understand celotypic traits as signs of true love; the mother who kills her children so that they will not suffer; the revolutionaries who give their lives or take them for the love of an idea of social revolution; or the lover who decides to kill his loved one (or the other way round) on seeing that his love has been lost.

What is the responsibility of culture in all these paradoxes? How many dramaturgically pre-established situations have we experienced in our stories of love? What pleasures or ghosts are hidden behind the mask of beliefs about the ideal of love? Could it be that the main cause of social conflicts is not hatred but an excess of blind love? What effects would the de-idealisation of love have on social order? And on us?