In the canon of Western thought, eros has occupied an unstable position. From Plato's Symposium, where desire serves as a ladder toward the Form of the Good, to Augustine's anxious reframing of love as a force requiring divine discipline, the philosophical tradition has tended to push eros toward one of two poles: transcendence or disorder. This binary has proven remarkably durable. Even in secular modernity, popular and academic discourse often toggles between celebrating romantic love as the highest form of self-realization and diagnosing it as a mechanism of social control. Federica Gregoratto's Love Troubles: A Philosophy of Eros enters this terrain with a deliberate refusal to accept either framing.
Gregoratto, a philosopher working at the intersection of critical theory and social philosophy, proposes instead that eros is best understood as a site of persistent normative friction — a "trouble" in the productive sense. The book does not aim to resolve the tensions inherent in desire but to map them with precision, offering a framework for thinking about love that is neither moralistic nor nihilistic.
Love as Structural Friction
The conceptual move at the heart of Love Troubles is a reorientation of philosophical attention. Rather than asking what love is — the ontological question that has dominated the tradition from Plato through the phenomenologists — Gregoratto asks what love does within structures of power, recognition, and vulnerability. This shift places her work in conversation with the Frankfurt School tradition, particularly its concern with how social norms shape subjective experience. The echoes of Axel Honneth's theory of recognition are audible, but Gregoratto's project is not merely derivative. By centering eros rather than broader categories of social recognition, she narrows the lens to a domain where asymmetries of power are especially intimate and especially difficult to articulate.
The term "trouble" itself carries deliberate resonance. Judith Butler's Gender Trouble famously argued that the disruptions within gender categories are not failures but revelations of how those categories are constructed. Gregoratto applies a structurally similar logic to love: the contradictions, disappointments, and power imbalances that attend erotic relationships are not aberrations from an ideal form of love but constitutive features of it. To philosophize about eros responsibly, on this account, requires engaging with those frictions rather than abstracting them away.
This approach yields a framework that is meticulously normative without being prescriptive. Gregoratto seeks to establish criteria for evaluating how people engage with desire — criteria sensitive to coercion, self-deception, and structural inequality — without collapsing into a set of rules about what love should look like. The distinction is subtle but consequential. It positions the book against both conservative moralisms that idealize particular relationship forms and certain strands of postmodern thought that treat all normative claims about intimacy as inherently suspect.
The Contemporary Stakes
The timing of this philosophical intervention is worth noting. The past decade has seen an intensification of public debate about the ethics of intimacy — from the renegotiation of consent norms to the proliferation of app-mediated dating to broader anxieties about loneliness and social atomization. These developments have generated substantial popular commentary but relatively little rigorous philosophical scaffolding. Much of the existing academic literature on love remains anchored in either analytic philosophy of emotion, which tends toward taxonomic precision at the expense of social context, or continental phenomenology, which can privilege first-person experience over structural analysis. Gregoratto's critical-theoretic approach occupies a different position, one that treats individual erotic experience and social structure as mutually constitutive rather than separable.
The book's insistence that love's troubles are features rather than bugs carries implications beyond the seminar room. If the frictions of desire are not problems to be optimized away — by better algorithms, better communication techniques, or better therapeutic frameworks — then the contemporary impulse to treat intimacy as a domain of self-improvement may itself be a form of evasion. Conversely, if normative evaluation of erotic life remains legitimate, then the relativist position that all arrangements of desire are equally valid faces its own challenge.
What remains to be seen is whether Gregoratto's framework can hold these tensions in productive suspension or whether, under pressure from specific cases, it will be pulled toward one pole or the other. The geometry of eros, it turns out, may resist the clean lines that any single philosophical vocabulary can draw.
With reporting from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Source · Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
