We are obsessed with love, with the duty to love and be loved, because the culture in which we live has made love one of the pillars of our identity. And yet, we have never truly learned how to love.

It is Eros that dominates our lives; for him, we are willing to sacrifice even happiness, because what truly interests us is not being happy, but being loved. Nevertheless, we are ignorant about love; we behave like self-taught amateurs. Perhaps this is because we come from two centuries in which love was considered a spontaneous, natural emotion, whereas Ovid already knew—as he wrote in the Ars Amatoria—that it is, on the contrary, a technology. Love is, moreover, full of contradictions; one need only think that throughout history it has been an instrument of gender domination. The indulgence with which we have tolerated its ambiguities is proportional to the immense expectations we have nurtured toward it.

On the other hand, while erotic life seemed to embody the most radical aspiration for freedom from rules, within the family, emotions have instead been transformed into institutions. Love is the secret engine of the way we produce wealth and distribute it to our loved ones.

In this illuminating and passionate book, moving from philosophy to politics, religion, law, and literature, Emanuele Coccia analyzes the sentiment that eludes us most, but from which we cannot abstain. Because each of us, deep down, is shaped by what we love. 

Love is the daily evidence that our 'I' has nothing original about it: not only does it not exist before our birth, but it cannot survive without an incessant activity of daily erotic exploration of the world. We needed everything we have loved to build ourselves, piece by piece, sensation by sensation, idea by idea, affection after affection. And we will need to love the world to continue being an 'I' until our very last breath.