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Capitalism has made rationality into a pervasive feature of human action and yet, far from heralding a loss of emotionality, capitalist culture has been accompanied with an unprecedented intensification of emotional life. This raises a puzzle: how could we have become increasingly rationalized and more intensely emotional??Emotions as Commodities offers a simple hypothesis: that consumer acts and emotional life have become closely and inseparably intertwined with each other, each one defining and enabling the other. Commodities facilitate the experience of emotions, and so emotions are converted into commodities. The contributors of this volume present the co-production of emotions and commodities as a new type of commodity that has gone unseen and unanalyzed by theories of consumption – emodity. Indeed, this innovative book explores how emodity includes atmospherical or mood-producing commodities; relation-marking commodities and mental commodities, all of which the purpose it is to change and improve the self. Analysing a variety of modern day situations such as emotional management through music, creation of urban sexual atmospheres and emotional transformation through psychotherapy, Emotions as Commodities will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, Marketing, Anthropology and Consumer Studies.

Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love. The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire. This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors. -- Publisher description

"The language of psychology is all-pervasive in American culture -- from 'The Sopranos' to 'Oprah', from the abundance of self-help books to the private consulting room, and from the support group to the magazine advice column. 'Saving the Modern Soul' examines the profound impact of therapeutic discourse on our lives and on our contemporary notions of identity. Eva Illouz plumbs today's particular cultural moment to understand how and why psychology has secured its place at the core of modern identity. She examines a wide range of sources to show how self-help culture has transformed contemporary emotional life and how therapy complicates individuals' lives even as it claims to dissect their emotional experiences and heal trauma"--Provided by publisher

Die Israelin Eva Illouz, die in Marokko geboren wurde, bewegt sich im Grenzbereich zwischen Soziologie, Medienwissenschaft und Psychologie. Unter anderem erforscht sie, wie die Wirtschaft das Privatleben beeinflusst und was Emotionen im Geschäftsleben bewirken. Ihre Erklärung für den Erfolg des Bestsellers "Fifty Shades of Grey" begründet sie damit, dass die klaren Rollenmuster und verbindlichen Absprachen zwischen den Protagonisten den Lesern gefallen, wohingegen die Realität oft irritierend anders aussieht. Eva Illouz hat ihre Rede "Sexual Freedom and the Rise of Uncertainty – Sexuelle Freiheit und die zunehmende Verunsicherung" in englischer Sprache gehalten.