230046 SE Reading Seminar: Niklas Luhman - Love as Passion (2020S)

Our notions of romantic love not only shape our expectations of a successful life, they also stimulate entire industries, from the dating industry to Valentine's Day business to couples therapy. Romantic love seems to be something that is taken for granted, and yet it is by no means a purely natural phenomenon: our understanding of love is subject to social and historical changes. Thus, as early as 1850, the Concourt brothers claimed that "love is man-made". This assumption, which is in essence sociological, was later confirmed many times, for example by the semantic study "Love as Passion" by Niklas Luhmann, whereby "semantics" is to be understood as a history of concepts. Luhmann shows how the concept of "love" as well as the discourses associated with this concept changed significantly over time: This applies, for example, to gender relations, to the concept of partnership and marriage, and to sexuality. Luhmann primarily draws on fiction literature from the 17th century onwards as a source of data, since it is precisely the literary form of the novel that over the centuries has influenced and documented how we think, speak and dream about love - and thus how we love.

The course objective: You will acquire a basic understanding of the historical-semantic methodology of systems theory. You will also acquire a deeper understanding of the social phenomenon of romantic love.