A brilliant, uncompromising inquiry into the deep, patriarchal roots of intimate partner violence.
Why does violence so often arise inside relationships marked by love, protection, family, or care? Lea Melandri begins from the disturbing proximity between tenderness and domination, tracing how the oldest divisions of civilization—male and female, public and private, mind and body—are reproduced in intimate life. Drawing on feminist practice, psychoanalysis, political history, and autobiographical reflection, she refuses explanations that isolate violence as an exception committed by monstrous individuals.
Love and Violence argues that the private sphere is not outside politics but one of its deepest laboratories. The dependencies formed in childhood, the idealization of motherhood, the erotic charge of power, and the social organization of gender all complicate the desire for freedom. Clear, unsettling, and urgent, this book offers a powerful vocabulary for understanding why domination persists within the very bonds that promise refuge.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter One: The Body and the Polis
The Non-Presentable Citizenship of the Body
The Ambiguous Border between Ethics and Politics
The Body and the Law
Beyond the Borders of Life
The Freedom to Resemble Others
If Power Were to Become Female
Chapter Two: Loving Mothers
Prisoners of a Dream
The Vexatious Factor of Civilization
The Vile Body
Liberated or Prostituted Bodies?
The Mother: The First and Last Taboo
Chapter Three: The Circle of Men
Warrior Asceticism
The Armed Defencelessness of the Man-Son
The Freedom to Be
Chapter Four: The Disquieting Slumber of the West
Night Trams
Belonging
The Astuteness of Eros
Por donde saldrá el sol?
Chapter Five: The Unstoppable Revolution
A Room of Thoughts
Dissident Desire
The Salvific Bilingualism of the Political Culture of Women
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Bibliography