People often talk about relationships without acknowledging their mysterious quality. Relationships cannot be understood as one entity plus another entity. Nor can they be understood as a merger that forms a new enlarged entity. So what is the logic of the relation? What happens to ‘the individual’ in a relation? This is another way of asking what is the social. It is also a way of asking what love is.

This course is concerned with the issues that arise when people discuss their ‘relationships’, but we will be significantly broadening the conventional scope of these discussions. We are interested in the differences between relational and identity-based ways of being in everyday life, and will explore these by comparing experiences of time and space. In the process we will deal directly with some of the most famous social thinkers, including Durkheim, Simmel, Buber, Sartre, Levinas, Bohm, Merleau-Ponty, Winnicott. We will also follow the themes into a variety of social settings, involving, among other things, celebrations, university classes, musical and sporting performances, the home, encounters in the street. The course pays close attention to Sociology and Anthropology’s own social and cultural processes, and to the processes through which students approach university studies.