CRIES AND WHISPERS ABOUT LOVE IN METAMODERNISM: A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH
Abstract
This article develops an interdisciplinary investigation into how contemporary metamodern philosophy conceptualizes love by integrating corpus linguistics with socio-philosophical analysis. While scholars of metamodernism often posit a cultural “return of love” grounded in renewed sensitivity, relationality, and ethical openness, we argue that these claims require empirical verification. Drawing on the work of 12 leading thinkers associated with speculative realism, new materialism, and accelerationism, we conduct a systematic examination of explicit references to love across their published works. Our findings reveal a far more heterogeneous and uneven landscape than is typically assumed: only a minority of philosophers – most notably Graham Harman, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, and Maya B. Kronic – develop robust or conceptually rich accounts of love, whereas others mention the term only in passing, metaphorically, or not at all.
Methodologically, the article combines four approaches: postcritical “reading as love,” corpus-linguistic analysis through concordances, collocations, and dispersion plots, theoretical, methodological and sociological triangulation, and also an interpretive model of philosophy as “talking to oneself.” This multi-layered design allows us to reconstruct how various metamodernist philosophical perspectives imagine love as an ontological, ethical, aesthetic, or political force. The range spans from posthuman, zoe-centered vitality (Braidotti), ecological enchantment and material kinship (Bennett), and dantean object-love grounded in autonomy (Harman), to darker visions of dissolution, erotic catastrophe, and cosmic decay (Nick Land, Reza Negarestani).
To contextualize these philosophical positions, we triangulate them with large-scale sociological data on romantic satisfaction, loneliness, parasocial bonds, and “social love” as defined in global indices. This reveals that metamodernist reconfigurations of love resonate with shifting affective structures worldwide, yet remain conceptually fragmented. We conclude by proposing a “metamodern formula of love” as a wide spectrum – from indifference and destructive passion to a balanced, responsible, post-anthropocentric ethos of care – while arguing that such models must be supplemented by explicitly political and institutional forms of solidarity necessary for ecological and planetary survival.
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