Love and Violence

A brilliant, uncompromising inquiry into the deep, patriarchal roots of intimate partner violence.Why does violence so often arise inside relationships marked by love, protection, family, or care? Lea Melandri begins from the disturbing proximity between tenderness and domination, tracing how the oldest divisions of civilization—male and female, public and private, mind and body—are reproduced in intimate life. Drawing on feminist practice, psychoanalysis, political history, and autobiographical reflection, she refuses explanations that isolate violence as an exception committed by monstrous individuals.Love and Violence argues that the private sphere is not outside politics but one of its deepest laboratories. The dependencies formed in childhood, the idealization of motherhood, the erotic charge of power, and the social organization of gender all complicate the desire for freedom. Clear, unsettling, and urgent, this book offers a powerful vocabulary for understanding why domination persists within the very bonds that promise refuge.