According to Zygmunt Bauman: «Loneliness spawns insecurity, but relationship seems to do nothing else. In a relationship you may feel as insecure as without it, or worse. Only the names you give your anxiety change» [15]. The amorous relationship, within a climate of “systemic financialization” (Gallino), becomes a “future” on the stock market: «Love is a mortgage loan drawn on an uncertain, and inscrutable, future» [21]. Bauman’s thought intersects with Ulrich Beck’s Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity) and Individualisierung (Individualization): «The smaller your mortgage loan, the less insecure you’d feel when exposed to the fluctuations of the future housing market; the less you invest in the relationship, the less insecure you’d feel when exposed to the fluctuations of your future emotions» [21]. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, in Das ganz normale Chaos der Liebe (The Normal Chaos of Love), write: «Die Freiheit, die die moderne Gesellschaft den Individuen gewährt, ist keine Garantie für das Gelingen von Beziehungen, sondern vielmehr eine Quelle von Unsicherheit und Risiko» [108] («The freedom that modern society grants to the individual is no guarantee for the success of relationships, but rather a source of uncertainty and risk»), where every form of connection becomes a risk, an insecurity, an uncertainty. Late-modern relations (λέγειν – legein), stripped of the λόγος (logos), fall into the sociological domain of “flexibility”: «The flexibility demanded by modern capitalism encourages a corresponding fluidity in personal relationships: bonds are easier to make and easier to break», according to Richard Sennett in The Culture of the New Capitalism. This insecurity, the fundamental nucleus of romantic relationships, is not found solely in the “new sociology.” Many Modernist philosophers and anthropologists anticipated Bauman. «Romantic love has been reshaped by cultural and economic forces, turning feelings into choices constantly renegotiated» [25] or «The commodification of love has transformed it into a product that can be consumed, marketed, and exchanged» [25], writes the anthropologist Eva Illouz in Consuming the Romantic Utopia (1997). Georges Bataille, from another era, asserts: «L’érotisme n’est pas un lien stable mais une transgression, un moment fugitif entre les individus» («Eroticism is not a stable bond but a transgression, a fleeting moment between individuals»), in L’Érotisme [1957]. Recent discussions all point back to Bauman, the “new Kant” of sociology: Sherry Turkle, in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other [2011] («Today, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology to find ways to connect and at the same time protect ourselves from it» [1]) and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age [2015]; Alain Ehrenberg, in La fatigue d’être soi. Dépression et société [1998] («Dans une società qui valorise l’autosuffisance, les relations deviennent des choix individuels, dépourvus de liens durables» [78] — «In a society that values self-sufficiency, relationships become individual choices, devoid of lasting bonds»); Barbara Fredrickson, in Love 2.0 [2013] («Love is a micro-moment of shared positive resonance»); Laura Kipnis in Against Love: A Polemic [2003] («Love is also a way of forgetting what the question is. Using love to escape love… it’s kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time»). Further contributions following Bauman’s wake derive from the analyses of Stephanie G. Wood, Helen Fisher, and Caroline Knowles. The characteristic flexibility and transience of romantic relations (linked to Eli Pariser’s “narcissistic filter bubbles” theory) is strikingly evident in literary Late-Modernism. Love songs become interchangeable, no longer applicable to a singular woman. The late-modern suddenly transforms amour fou (mad love)—through the escalation of an obsessive delirium regarding the “diabolized” woman—into a transient sexual relationship, replete with comfort and seductivity. Literary Late-Modernism, rejecting the “T-shirt poetry” of Jacques Prévert (the indecent Les enfants qui s’aiment) or Pablo Neruda (No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal) and the “amorous nonsense” of Italian lyric/elegaic poetry (the Lamarque dimension), creates riots aligned with recent socio-anthropological discourse. In the absence of significant aesthetic contributions—except for the anachronistic analyses of Julia Kristeva, Byung-Chul Han, and Alain Badiou, it references neuroscience (Acevedo, Fisher, Brown) and the psychology of relationships (Tartakovsky, Fincham, Monk, Randall, Rhoades, Chen, Xia, Dunne, Lehmiller). Close to the modern analytical tradition, literary Late-Modernism rejects all forms of metaphysics: it diagnoses the non-existence of eternal love – following the ποίησις (poiesis) of Alfredo Rienzi, Giorgio Linguaglossa, Henrik Nordbrandt, and Raffaella Milandri- anchoring it firmly to the outcomes of the new sociology (πρᾶξις – praxis). Eternal love is a “lottery draw” (un terno al lotto) [just as the rebellious Lombards boycotted Austrian tobacco and lotteries]. Late-Modernism “does not care” and sings of the hic et nunc (the Lombard tradition) of the sexual relationship, in stark contrast to Modernist intimism.

Ivan Pozzoni