Summons of Love

Mari Ruti was educated at Brown University and Harvard University. She is professor of critical theory at the University of Toronto, where she teaches contemporary theory, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and gender and sexuality studies. She is also the author of Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life and A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living.

• Introduction Love as an Existential Nudge An Invitation to Self-Actualization The Risks of Love Love's Panoramic Calling Love as a Gamble 1. The Hall of Mirrors The Quest for Wholeness The Beloved as Mirror The Pitfalls of Narcissism The Specificity of Desire The Speck of Corruption 2. The Patterns of Passion The Compulsion to Repeat Repetition as World-Structuring Missing Our Step Riding the Turbulence Managing the Repetition 3. The Sliver of Eternity The Human and the Divine The Nick of Time The Fall into Tenderness The Process of Becoming The Reinvention of Identity 4. The Midst of Life The True Self The Touch of Madness The Flight from Passion Beyond Romantic Nihilism Passion's Enduring Imprint 5. The Edge of Mystery The Enigma of the Other Messages That Motivate The Clearing of Unknowability The Softness of Silence The Craving for Solitude 6. The Ambivalence of Ideals Between Reality and Fantasy The Generosity of Ideals Ideals That Deplete Keeping Desire Alive Love beyond Ideals 7. The Intrigue of Obstacles Jumping Hurdles When Satisfaction Threatens The Desire to Desire The Bedrock of Desire Love's Apprenticeship 8. The Initiations of Sadness The Aftermath of Loss From Sadness to Creativity Moving beyond Melancholia Giving Up Pain The Wisdom of the Past 9. The Lessons of Love The Transience of Romance The Mission of Love Respecting Love's Rhythm The Fidelity to Love Love as a Process Conclusion The Ethics of Relationality A Call for Accountability Steering Clear of Masochism The Other Side Continuing to Care

The self-help field is saturated with books on love, yet Mari Ruti's book, The Summons of Love, is in a class by itself-elegantly and beautifully written, superior in every way. -- Henry Kellerman, psychologist, psychoanalyst, and author of Love Is Not Enough: What It Takes To Make It Work and The 4 Steps to Peace of Mind: The Simple Effective Way to Cure Our Emotional Symptoms The Summons of Love distills decades of psychoanalytic wisdom into a graceful, engaging, and eminently useful exploration of the ups and downs of romantic love. Whether a veteran or novice in the ways of love, the reader takes away an enriched understanding of what it means to invest in deep relating. -- Margaret Crastnopol, psychoanalyst and clinical instructor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington Ruti is simultaneously clarifying and obscuring, perhaps inevitably in keeping with her subject. Publishers Weekly A psychological look at love relationships and their pragmatic benefits that cleverly blends scientific language and romantic concepts. Kirkus Reviews offers a series of wonderfully counterintuitive insights about what one learns from love and pain and sadness one must sometimes endure to get it, keep it, and survive it. Choice Mari Ruti's The Summons of Love is a self-help book with a unique twist: it's grounded in Lacanian psychoanalysis. The insertion of high theory into the advice-book genre is on its face wildly audacious. In its execution, Ruti's book offers a very smart and perceptive discussion of love, and I recommend it highly. -- David Sigler Foucault Studies