Eva Illouz's Cold Intimacies: A Critical Review

Eva Illouz's Cold Intimacies: A Critical Review

1. What is Illouz's Topic and Purpose?

Comprised of papers prepared for the Adorno Lectures in Frankfurt, Cold Intimacies traces the development of psychological knowledge of emotions and how this knowledge has come to reorganize commonsensical understandings of experience itself. The purpose of Cold Intimacies is to continue the Frankfurt School method of cultural critique: "when we focus on this dimension of capitalism--on its emotions so to speak--we may be in a position to uncover another order in the social organization of capitalism" (p. 4). The rise of capitalism, representative ...