Love is subversive
Newspaper ELEFTHEROTYPIA, 7 January 2002
Interview by Anna Stergiou
DOES IT EVEN NEED ASKING…
…BECAUSE relations between the two sexes are going through a prolonged crisis. …Because, with women’s entry into the workforce, social structures, relationships and roles changed, without reducing their responsibilities at home. …Because men today are also searching for their own identity and do not know how to behave. …Because, in informal conversations, everyone speaks about the loneliness and distance that exist between the two sexes. …Because communication is difficult—a fact captured with great insight in author Nadia Seremetakis’s new subversive book, entitled Come into Love.
Love is subversive
– Is love subversive?
“In Greek thought, it was and still is. Let us look today, for example, at contemporary songwriting—such as that of the popular Lina Nikolakopoulou, among others. The word eros is Greek and is directly connected with the concept of passion, which is the point at which love and death converge. By death here, we mean the death of the self. It is subversive.”
– Is love absent today?
“It is not a question of whether love is absent, but of how it has been transformed—namely, how today it has become synonymous with sex. But is love only sex?”
– Surely it should not be. But what, ultimately, is to blame—our selfishness? The fact that we grow up believing we will find love in the ideal partner, who does not exist?
“I would prefer to answer with a poetic excerpt from the book COME INTO LOVE: ‘Bring your taste to poetry, your fingers to music, your palm to the flame, your hair to the wind… Come into love in this way, with your whole self, and then seek me out to join you on your walk…’”
– We are accustomed to your scholarly books on cultural anthropology. What were the deeper reasons that prompted you to write this book?
“Here, it was not deeper reasons that mattered most, but inspiration.”
– Forgive me for being indiscreet. Are you in love today?
“Very much so.”
