Monday Night — 02.19.01 — Bell Hooks / Love — Reading Group
Comments Off on Monday Night — 02.19.01 — Bell Hooks / Love — Reading GroupMonday Night — 02.19.01 — Bell Hooks / Love — Reading Group
Love bell hooks style
CONTENTS:
1. About This Monday (text selected by Paige and Leeza)
2. Some info about text
3. About READING E-MAIL LIST
4. About efax Reader
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1. About This Monday
Using our recent reading from Roland Barthes as a link, Paige and Leeza have
suggested the following bell hooks text….All About Love : New Visions.
Love as action, Love as a source of an ethical practice. This Monday please
join as we look at two sections of this text. The first part of the reading is
enclosed, and part two will be forwarded to those who are interested. See
Section 3 below if you would like to receive the second part of the reading.
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2. Excerpt from beginning of book + some general info
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THE MEN IN my life have always been the folks who are wary of using the word “love” lightly. They are wary because they believe women make too much of love. And they know that what we think love means is not always what they believe it means. Our
confusion about what we mean when we use the word “love” is the source of our difficulty in loving. If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying. Dictionary definitions of love tend to emphasize romantic love, defining love first and foremost as “profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person, especially when based on sexual attraction.” Of course, other definitions let the reader know one may have such feelings within a
context that is not sexual. However, deep affection does not really adequately describe love’s meaning.
The vast majority of books on the subject of love work hard to avoid giving clear definitions. In the introduction to Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of Love she declares “Love is the great intangible.” A few sentences down from this she suggests: “Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one can agree on what it is.” Coyly, she adds, “We use the word love in such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything.” No definition ever appears in her book that would help anyone trying to learn the art of loving. Yet she is not alone in writing of love in ways that cloud our understanding. When the very meaning of the word is cloaked in mystery, it should not come as a surprise that most people find it hard to define what they mean when they use the word “love.”
Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition. The word “love” is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb. I spent years searching for a meaningful definition of the word “love,” and was deeply relieved when I found one in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s classic self-help book The Road Less Traveled, first published in 1978. Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Explaining further, he continues, “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.
Everyone who has witnessed the growth process of a newborn child from the moment of birth on sees clearly that before language is known, before the identity of caretakers is recognized, babies respond to affectionate care. Usually they respond with sounds or looks of pleasure. As they grow older they respond to affectionate care by giving affection, cooing at the sight of a welcomed caretaker. Affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients-care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. Learning faulty definitions of love when we are quite young makes it difficult to be loving as we grow older. We start out committed to the right path but go in the wrong direction. Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them, that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called “cathexis.” In his book Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us “confuse cathecting with loving.” We all know how often individuals feeling connected to someone through the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.
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“The word “love” is most often defined as a noun, yet…we would all love to
better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she
comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most
provacative and intensely personel, the renowned scholar,
cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as romance. In
its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a
society bereft with lovelessness.
As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explode
the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart.
In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional
connection and society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love. Razing
the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she
provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for the
individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the
“100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.” All About Love is a powerful
affirmation of just how profoundly she can.
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From Booklist January 1, 2000
It’s obvious in all of hooks’ forthright works, from her stunning memoirs
to her seminal works on race, gender, art, and education, that for her writing
is a moral act. Now, in this clarion treatise, she writes from a spiritual perspective
to offer “new ways of thinking about love.” Motivated both by her own struggles
with heartache and by the despair she observes in society at large, hooks defines
love as “an action rather than a feeling” in a gracefully flowing narrative that begins
with family life, “the original school of love,” and ultimately yields fresh insights
into the nature of romance, the value of community, and the pitfalls of our
consumer-oriented culture. Quoting spiritual leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.,
a “prophet of love,” hooks explains that there can be no justice without love, and
that our prevailing sense of spiritual emptiness can only be remedied by overcoming
our fear and accepting love in its most spiritual aspects as our “true destiny.”
– Donna Seaman
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3. READING LIST
If you are already on the READING LIST, please disregard
To prevent flooding people’s e-mails with large files,
I am assembling a list of people who would like to receive part 2 of this week’s reading.
I am also starting a list of people who do not mind receiving the full readings each week.
If you would like to receive this week’s reading, you have two choices:
1. Just this week!
Just send an e-mail to sixteenbeaver@aol.com with subject heading “bellhooks”. Please
indicate within the e-mail message to which e-mail address you would like it sent.
2. Always and Forever!
If you would like to be placed on a list that always receives the readings (in full).
Then send an e-mail to sixteenbeaver@aol.com with subject heading “READING LIST”
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4. A NOTE ON THE EFAX MESSENGER:
For Mondays we often like to distribute work, notes, readings to accompany presentations. In these cases we use this messenger as a simple and cost efficient way of distributing the materials. The download is short (it is a small program) and quite simple to use. It allows you to read digital faxes (and of course to print them). When you follow the link below, please make sure to download the correct viewer. There is one for Windows and one for Mac. The one for Mac will take a bit longer to download. Here is the link,
http://www.efax.com/need/index.html