bell hooks: Abuse and Imperfect Love

What does it mean to love? I might respond one way, you might respond another, and bell hooks might respond that the asymmetry in our answers is exactly why we, as a society, have become so bad at loving. Love, despite its prevalence in both religious and secular conceptions of ideal societies, is surprisingly oft-neglected by many scholars in diagnosing the key issues afflicting contemporary society. Thus, in All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks urges us to consider love, or more so lovelessness (our inability to understand and practice love for one another), as what lies behind the widespread misunderstanding, conflict, and alienation we observe in modern society. hooks proposes a radical conception of love as defined by action rather than emotion, and as part of this redefinition of love, hooks suggests that love and mistreatment (what she labels abuse) can never coexist. In this essay, I argue that this particular claim about the coexistence of love and abuse does more harm than good for hooks' conception of love. I show that love does not always have to be perfect, and then I hope to show that at least some cases of abuse or mistreatment must be thought of as simply imperfect love. For love to preclude serious cases of abuse in the way she hopes for, hooks must rethink her definitions of love and abuse. Importantly, I do not hope to argue against love as a fundamental, relevant idea in ethics. Rather, by challenging hooks, and others, to critically re-examine the boundaries of loving action, I hope to resurface the idea of love as a practical ethic central to many of the most relevant contemporary issues that ethics is concerned with.