Love is the Capitalist Site of Utopia

I argue that the long-lasting power of love is explained-if only partially-by the fact that love is a privileged site for the experience of utopia.

In capitalist societies, love contains a utopian dimension that cannot be easily reduced to "false consciousness" or to the presumed power of "ideology" to recruit people's desires.

Instead, the longing for utopia at the heart of romantic love possesses deep affinities with the experience of the sacred.

As [Emile] Durkheim has suggested, such experience has not disappeared from secular societies but has migrated from religion proper to other domains of culture.

Romantic love is one site of this displacement.

'Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism' by Eva Illouz
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003ODJH8Q