From 2015 to 2017, at the University of Melbourne, I wrote a philosophy masters thesis about love and intimate partner abuse.
More or less, the goal was to come up with a better concept of love. I started with bell hooks’ maxim that “love is incompatible with abuse”, and tried to think through what it would mean to really take that seriously. What I came to – mostly after reading hundreds of testimonies of intimate partner abuse survivors – is that everything abuse erodes in a person, the act of loving them ought to support. The precise psychological integrity that abuse weakens, love should be the committed act of strengthening. With the help of Val Plumwood’s analysis of the logic of oppression, I argue for a way of understanding abuse that attempts to make it as hard as humanly possible to mistake it for love.
‘The Logical Structure of Love’ has been read much more widely than I expected it to, and I’ve received a shocking (to me) number of messages and emails from people who say that it’s helped them. I’ve made it available for free here in the hope that it might be able to keep doing that.
ada connor 