(I “love” that hooks deems self-help books like Peck’s worthy of critical examination.) Fundamentally, hooks’ definition is grounded in Fromm’s classic insistence that love is not solely a feeling but an action. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled and Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.
Here, hooks fuses meanings from two texts she repeatedly references-M. So, what is love? In All About Love: New Visions, hooks notes that out of the many books she read on the topic, almost all of them failed to provide any definition, leaving the meaning of love “cloaked in mystery.” Based on her readings and life experience, hooks offers her own definition: the will to nurture one’s own and another’s spiritual and emotional growth, as well as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.
Not your family, not your friends, not your “lover.” You also might discover that you don’t love anyone either. Reading hooks' works on love, you’ll likely discover, for the most part, that nobody loves you. Everyone thinks they know what love is, but most have no clue. The word “love,” she claims, is practically devoid of meaning. For hooks, this presumed understanding is a fallacy. In works by hooks that I recently revisited and read, the “something else” is love.Ĭrooned of in song, captured in film, immortalized in poetry, love is discussed as if everyone knows what’s being talked about. Jargon presupposes an agreement on the definition of the relevant terms, allowing the one using it to communicate succinctly and without much context, usually in service of talking about something else. Yet “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” is also jargon-terminology that compresses complex concepts into one or a few words, typically for an audience that shares some specialized knowledge. It is hooks’ catchphrase, and in America’s mass media-saturated culture where catchphrases are associated with sitcoms, maybe the term had become devoid of any meaning other than its association with hooks, the feminist theorist, and the fact that her audiences had been conditioned to laugh whenever she said it. “Often in my lectures when I use the phrase ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ to describe our nation’s political system,” writes bell hooks in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, “audiences laugh.” But no one could ever explain to her what was so funny.
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