Thinking Through Loneliness - Professor Diane Enns

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Résumé :
This is the peculiar paradox of loneliness: I am unseen yet I feel exposed, as though my most internal suffering were on public display, as though I am disclosing to the world the vulnerability it does not want to see. By reflecting on the experience of loneliness through the author's own life, the narratives of others and analyses from Arendt to Berardi, Thinking Through Loneliness explores the ambiguities of being alone. It seeks to defy the reductionist tendencies of the current loneliness experts, looking beyond loneliness as a collective health crisis to consider what it tells us about our great need for one another and what happens when we fail to meet this need. Our social needs vary, however; to investigate loneliness is to inquire into the contradictions of the human condition-we are alone and together, separate and attached-which gives rise to the need for individuality on the one hand, and for intimacy on the other. To be lonely is to suffer from an unfulfilled desire to be close to others. But we can also suffer from an unfulfilled desire to be separate from others. Diane Enns explores how loneliness might be an inescapable dimension of human existence, but also the collective symptom of social failure. The lonely are not to blame for their distress; they are witnesses to the failure of our contemporary social world, dramatically transformed in recent decades by digital technology, and changes in how we work, love, socialize, and live together in households, neighbourhoods and cities. Enns argues it is crucial to recognise the structural conditions-economic, political, institutional, technological-that give rise to the isolation that produces loneliness. Only then can we work to undermine these conditions, preserving all that is best about human social life.

Biographie:
Diane Enns

Sommaire:
preface acknowledgements PART I: What Is Loneliness? 1. The Paradox (I) 2. The Lonely I 3. The Lonely We 4. Stigma 5. In the Village 6. In the Loneliness Laboratory 7. The Paradox (II) 8. What is Loneliness? 9. The Happiness of Others 10. The Alienation of Gregor Samsa 11. The Philosopher Stands Alone 12. In the Hole 13. The Ambivalence of Solitude 14. Solus 15. Alone Together PART II: Why Are We Lonely? 1. Organized Loneliness 2. The Tyranny of the Couple 3. At Home 4. The Antisocial Family 5. Against Community 6. Nostalgia 7. The Soul at Work 8. In the Desert 9. The Iron Band of Technology 10. Social Failure PART III: What Do We Need? 1. Pandemic Pause 2. To Belong 3. Proximity 4. Distance 5. In the Neighborhood 6. At the Caf? 7. At the Market 8. Care 9. Friend 10. Love 11. The Join 12. Witness bibliography index