The Screen of Enamoration: Love in the Age of Google

Today, Roland Barthes is among the less trendy of the famed French theorists of the sixties and seventies, or at least one of those considered less germane to our current moment. While revivals of Deleuze, Lacan, Foucault, and even Derrida abound as potential solutions to the social, cultural, and economic problems plaguing the planet, Barthes rarely pops his head outside of the undergraduate classroom. As a serious political conversation piece, love, too, has gone out of fashion. While the hippie movement of Barthes’s own generation united love with countercultural politics, today such attempts seem disengaged and out of touch. A data-pull from Google Scholar articles shows that academic work on love has halved in the past five years. The more pressing our political struggles become, the more love recedes into the background.

So in a time when even football has become a stage for protest, does love somehow manage to retain amnesty from politics? Even when we think about some of history’s most turbulent moments, love manages, a romance set in the midst of the French 1968 riots. While Molotov cocktails are going off hourly on the streets, the characters, ensconced in their bourgeois Parisian apartment, are given vast distance from their context to experiment with sex and love.