DOES LOVE ENDURE? THE PROVOCATION OF THE OTHER IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Sergio Belardinelli, former Professor of the Sociology of Cultural Processes, Università di Bologna; Eva Illouz, sociologist and Director of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. Introduced by Marco Aluigi, Deputy Director of the Meeting for Friendship Amongst Peoples ETS Foundation

Love is not an idea: it is a gaze, a gesture, a presence that changes the way the world appears. In an age in which artificial intelligence simulates emotions and digital platforms tell us whom to desire, the question becomes urgent: is there something in the experience of love that no algorithm can reach? Authentic love has always been the provocation of the other: not what confirms our expectations, but what cracks them open. It is precisely this irreducibility of the other, their freedom, their otherness, that makes love something radically different from a programmable experience.