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And here Arditi offers a very interesting idea, namely that social distance derives not from the absence of common traits, but from the abstract nature of these traits. Remoteness, that is, does not set in because people have nothing in common, but because the things they have in common are, or have become, too common. To put this slightly differently, I would suggest that remoteness derives from the fact that people now share a common and highly standardized language.

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Conversely, closeness results from the specificity and exclusivity of similarities shared between two entities. In this sense, nearness implies the sharing of “existentially generated meanings.” It is, in other words, the fact that, to an increasing degree, we have cultural techniques to standardize intimate relationships, to talk about them and manage them in a generalized way, which weakens our capacity for nearness, the congruence between subject and object.

— Cold Intimacies by Eva Illouz

The Internet imagination undercuts intuitive imagination because it is not retrospective, but prospective, that is, forward looking, and therefore disconnected from one’s intuitive, practical, and tacit past knowledge. Moreover, because it relies on a mass of text-based cognitive knowledge, it is dominated by verbal overshadowing, a prevalence of language which interferes with processes of visual and bodily recognition. Finally, I would add that because the Internet makes us see the whole market of possible choices available to us (crudely put: it enables price shopping), in the actual encounter, we will usually tend to undervalue, not overvalue, the person encountered.

— Cold Intimacies by Eva Illouz

To love is to recognize libidinously and in someone else’s body our social past and our social aspirations.

— Cold Intimacies by Eva Illouz

Yet, at the same time, these neutral and rational procedures of speech are accompanied by an intensely subjectivist way of legitimating one’s sentiments. For the bearer of an emotion is recognized as the ultimate arbiter of their own feelings. “I feel that … ” implies not only that one has the right to feel that way, but also that such right entitles one to be accepted and recognized simply by virtue of feeling a certain way. To say “I feel hurt” allows little discussion and in fact demands immediate recognition of that hurt. The model of communication thus pulls relations in opposite directions: it submits relationships to procedures of speech which aim at neutralizing the emotional dynamic as that of guilt, anger, resentment, shame, or frustration, etc.; yet it intensifies subjectivism and emotivism, making us regard our emotions as having a validity of their own by the very fact of being expressed. I am not sure this is conducive to recognition for, as Judith Butler puts it, “recognition begins with the insight that one is lost in the other, appropriated in and by an alterity that is and is not oneself … ”

— Cold Intimacies by Eva Illouz

My second observation is that throughout the twentieth century, there has been an increased emotional androgynization of men and women, due to the fact that capitalism tapped into and mobilized the emotional resources of service workers, and to the fact that concomitantly to their entry into the workforce, feminism called on women to become autonomous, self-reliant, and conscious of their rights inside the private sphere. Thus, if the sphere of production put affect at the center of models of sociability, intimate relationships increasingly put at their center a political and economic model of bargaining and exchange.

— Cold Intimacies by Eva Illouz

The notion of “communication” – and of what I would like to almost call “communicative competence” – is an outstanding example of what Foucault called an episteme, a new object of knowledge which in turn generates new instruments and practices of knowledge.

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“Communication” is thus a technology of self-management relying extensively on language and on the proper management of emotions but with the aim of engineering inter- and intra-emotional coordination.

— Cold Intimacies by Eva Illouz