“I Am Trying to Improve the Care of Women, That Is My Goal.”

In Conversation about Love and Abortion with Giessen-based GP Kristina Hänel

In its “Berlin Declaration for the Protection of Unborn Life”, the Bundesverband Lebensrecht demanded “love and responsibility instead of abortions.” [1] The confederation is the umbrella organization for several ‘Pro-Life’ groups in Germany which organize every year the ‘March for Life’ in Berlin. But what has love got to do with this? […]

Turkey’s Pioneering Psychoanalyst

İzeddin Şadan’s Disquisition on (Homosexual) Love as Sickness

İzeddin Şadan, considered to be among the pioneers of psychoanalysis in Turkey, published a series of essays in 1936 titled “Eros (Aşk) İle Mücadele” [“Strife with Eros (Love)”] in the popular magazine Yeni Adam. He hailed these essays as a landmark in the scientific endeavor to objectively lay out the true nature of love. In them, he described love as “a volatile microbe” constituting sickness with its origins in Christianity; however, by inverted logic, he projected the same sickness onto Islam, in particular Sufism, which he disparaged as homosexual debauchery. This article looks at how Şadan’s pathologizing of Sufi love of beardless boys as sexual perversion is itself a symptom of pathology, pointing towards a fundamental change in the gendered/modernized/Orientalized subject’s relationship with the other and itself.

“Alle Apparate abschalten.” Conceiving Love and Technology with Heidegger And Kittler

In 2014, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking warned about the consequences of an upcoming explosion of artificial intelligence (AI). Soon, he reasoned, electronic technology could exceed human capacities and eliminate human control by programming itself: […]

An Erotic Re-Imagination of Human/Nature Relationality

Ecosexuality and the Legacies of Coloniality in Love and Sex

How much are our practices of love and sex shaped by the logic of coloniality? Why should we ask this question in an attempt to re-imagine human/non-human relations? These rather large questions constitute the main concern of this paper. In what follows, I try to dissect and ‘trouble’ our ideas of love and sex by looking at ecosexuality as a conceptual tool in order to challenge the colonial binary (and hierarchical) logic of nature/culture, human/non-human. […]

Caring like a State

Politicizing Love, Touch, and Precarious Lives in the Time of COVID-19

The year 2020 will be remembered as the year of the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). The pandemic spread around the globe, and as of February 5, 2021,[footnote]“WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard,” World Health Organization, 2020, accessed December 1, 2020, .[/footnote] 104,370,550 persons had been infected, with an additional 271,180 lives taken to an early grave — sadly, this tragic record will only increase in the upcoming months. As the death toll steadily rose throughout the year, several voices were heard, crying for the need for more compassion, more love, more kindness […]