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La Civilisation des émotions: Entretiens avec Elena Scappaticci
Comment le capitalisme a-t-il envahi notre vie amoureuse et sexuelle ? Comment réinventer la gauche entre le trumpisme et la politique des identités ? Où va Israël après les massacres du 7 Octobre ? Ce livre d’entretiens relie brillamment tous les ouvrages d’Eva Illouz, retraçant la genèse d’une œuvre lucide, portée par une pensée critique toujours en mouvement. À travers elle, on découvre les intuitions d’une chercheuse, les combats d’une intellectuelle de gauche, les déchirements d’une femme juive. Décryptant le monde contemporain tout en défendant les libertés démocratiques et la production du savoir dans une société ouverte, Eva Illouz incarne aujourd’hui le courage en sciences sociales.
Sociologue, directrice d’études à l’EHESS, Eva Illouz travaille sur la marchandisation des émotions et l’impact du capitalisme sur nos affects. Récompensée par les prix Anneliese-Maier, EMET, Schirrmacher et Aby-Warburg pour l’ensemble de son œuvre, elle est l’autrice d’une quinzaine de livres traduits dans le monde entier, tels que Pourquoi l’amour fait mal (Seuil, 2012) et La Fin de l’amour (Seuil, 2020).
Elena Scappaticci est journaliste et éditrice, ancienne rédactrice en chef web d’Usbek & Rica et responsable éditoriale chez Arkhê Éditions.
Préface d’Ivan Jablonka
Sociologue, directrice d’études à l’EHESS, Eva Illouz travaille sur la marchandisation des émotions et l’impact du capitalisme sur nos affects. Récompensée par les prix Anneliese-Maier, EMET, Schirrmacher et Aby-Warburg pour l’ensemble de son œuvre, elle est l’autrice d’une quinzaine de livres traduits dans le monde entier, tels que Pourquoi l’amour fait mal (Seuil, 2012) et La Fin de l’amour (Seuil, 2020).
Elena Scappaticci est journaliste et éditrice, ancienne rédactrice en chef web d’Usbek & Rica et responsable éditoriale chez Arkhê Éditions.
Préface d’Ivan Jablonka
192 pages, Paperback
Published November 7, 2025
10 people want to read
About the author
Eva Illouz
51 books651 followersEva Illouz (Hebrew: אווה אילוז) is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Since October 2012 she has been President of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. She is Bezalel's first woman president. Since 2015, Illouz has been a professor at Paris's School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (École des hautes études en sciences sociales).
The research developed by Illouz from her dissertation onward focuses on a number of themes at the junction of the study of emotions, culture and communication:
The ways in which capitalism has transformed emotional patterns
One dominant theme concerns the ways in which capitalism has transformed emotional patterns, in the realms of both consumption and production.
Consuming the Romantic Utopia
Illouz's first book addresses a dual process: the commodification of romance and the romanticization of commodities. Looking at a wide sample of movies and advertising images in women’s magazines of the 1930s, Illouz finds that advertising and cinematic culture presented commodities as the vector for emotional experiences and particularly the experience of romance. Commodities of many kinds – soaps, refrigerators, vacation packages, watches, diamonds, cereals, cosmetics, and many others – were presented as enabling the experience of love and romance. The second process was that of the commodification of romance, the process by which the 19th-century practice of calling on a woman, that is going to her home, was replaced by dating: going out and consuming the increasingly powerful industries of leisure. Romantic encounters moved from the home to the sphere of consumer leisure with the result that the search for romantic love was made into a vector for the consumption of leisure goods produced by expanding industries of leisure.
Cold Intimacies and Saving the Modern Soul
In Cold Intimacies and Saving the Modern Soul Illouz examines how emotions figure in the realm of economic production: in the American corporation, from the 1920s onward emotions became a conscious object of knowledge and construction and became closely connected to the language and techniques of economic efficiency. Psychologists were hired by American corporations to help increase productivity and better manage the workforce and bridged the emotional and the economic realms, intertwining emotions with the realm of economic action in the form of a radically new way of conceiving of the production process. So whether in the realm of production or that of consumption, emotions have been actively mobilized, solicited and shaped by economic forces, thus making modern people simultaneously emotional and economic actors.
The role of popular clinical psychology in shaping modern identity
Illouz argues that psychology is absolutely central to the constitution of modern identity and to modern emotional life: from the 1920s to the 1960s clinical psychologists became an extraordinarily dominant social group as they entered the army, the corporation, the school, the state, social services, the media, child rearing, sexuality, marriage, church pastoral care. In all of these realms, psychology established itself as the ultimate authority in matters of human distress by offering techniques to transform and overcome that distress. Psychologists of all persuasions have provided the main narrative of self-development for the 20th century. The psychological persuasion has transformed what was classified as a moral problem into a disease and may thus be understood as part and parcel of the broader phenomenon of the medicalization of social life. What is common to theme 1 and theme 2 is that both love and psychological health constitute utopias of happiness for the modern self, that both are mediated through consumption and that both constitute horizons to which the modern self aspires. In that sense, one overarching theme of her work can be called
The research developed by Illouz from her dissertation onward focuses on a number of themes at the junction of the study of emotions, culture and communication:
The ways in which capitalism has transformed emotional patterns
One dominant theme concerns the ways in which capitalism has transformed emotional patterns, in the realms of both consumption and production.
Consuming the Romantic Utopia
Illouz's first book addresses a dual process: the commodification of romance and the romanticization of commodities. Looking at a wide sample of movies and advertising images in women’s magazines of the 1930s, Illouz finds that advertising and cinematic culture presented commodities as the vector for emotional experiences and particularly the experience of romance. Commodities of many kinds – soaps, refrigerators, vacation packages, watches, diamonds, cereals, cosmetics, and many others – were presented as enabling the experience of love and romance. The second process was that of the commodification of romance, the process by which the 19th-century practice of calling on a woman, that is going to her home, was replaced by dating: going out and consuming the increasingly powerful industries of leisure. Romantic encounters moved from the home to the sphere of consumer leisure with the result that the search for romantic love was made into a vector for the consumption of leisure goods produced by expanding industries of leisure.
Cold Intimacies and Saving the Modern Soul
In Cold Intimacies and Saving the Modern Soul Illouz examines how emotions figure in the realm of economic production: in the American corporation, from the 1920s onward emotions became a conscious object of knowledge and construction and became closely connected to the language and techniques of economic efficiency. Psychologists were hired by American corporations to help increase productivity and better manage the workforce and bridged the emotional and the economic realms, intertwining emotions with the realm of economic action in the form of a radically new way of conceiving of the production process. So whether in the realm of production or that of consumption, emotions have been actively mobilized, solicited and shaped by economic forces, thus making modern people simultaneously emotional and economic actors.
The role of popular clinical psychology in shaping modern identity
Illouz argues that psychology is absolutely central to the constitution of modern identity and to modern emotional life: from the 1920s to the 1960s clinical psychologists became an extraordinarily dominant social group as they entered the army, the corporation, the school, the state, social services, the media, child rearing, sexuality, marriage, church pastoral care. In all of these realms, psychology established itself as the ultimate authority in matters of human distress by offering techniques to transform and overcome that distress. Psychologists of all persuasions have provided the main narrative of self-development for the 20th century. The psychological persuasion has transformed what was classified as a moral problem into a disease and may thus be understood as part and parcel of the broader phenomenon of the medicalization of social life. What is common to theme 1 and theme 2 is that both love and psychological health constitute utopias of happiness for the modern self, that both are mediated through consumption and that both constitute horizons to which the modern self aspires. In that sense, one overarching theme of her work can be called
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December 14, 2025
Je suis fan d’Eva Illouz et ce livre était à la hauteur de mes attentes! Structuré comme une longue conversation entre la journaliste Elena Scappaticci et Eva Illouz, il aborde tous les thèmes qui ont constitué l’œuvre d’Eva Illouz: les ambiguïtés de la vie d’immigré, son combat pour mieux comprendre la condition féminine aujourd’hui, les enjeux du wokisme et les risques actuels sur l’avenir de la démocratie. Toujours des positions très affirmées, mais basées sur des analyses très nuancées et des concepts finement définis, c’est un régal!
Displaying 1 of 1 review