The Embodiment of Love in Transformative Experiences
The Embodiment of Love in Transformative Experiences
In this featured topic issue, we aim to explore how love can motivate, contribute, or even constitute a transformative experience. There is an important debate in philosophy about transformative experiences, those experiences that have the potential to change one’s sense of self and the relationship to others and the world. Transformative experiences can work at different levels, from perception-based changes to more cognitive ones. They can be understood in terms of a conversion of the soul, or epiphanies. In this special issue, we are mostly interested in discussing how love can work on the embodied level and, so, transform patterns of affective sense-making in transformative experiences. How does love transform an embodied subject and her affective sense-making? This requires an interdisciplinary approach able to combine philosophical work with empirical research, for instance, phenomenological and enactive approaches to the embodiment of love, practice-oriented religious studies, cross-cultural research, fieldwork and autoethnography about transformative experiences, somatic and body-oriented research methodologies, and cognitive science of extraordinary states of consciousness. Given the rich symbolism of love as a source of spiritual transformation, approaches based on literary studies, poetry, and art are also important interlocutors for such interdisciplinary investigations.
We welcome papers that discuss topics such as (not exhaustive list):
- Love in embodied cognition: changes in patterns of salience, attention, valuation, concern, and action readiness
- The phenomenology of transformative love: intercorporeality, interaffectivity, or loving sense-making, for instance
- How the experience of love reshapes affective habits, bodily dispositions, and modes of relating to others and the world
- The temporality of the embodiment of love in transformative experiences: gradual vs. sudden transformations, repetition, habituation, rupture, continuity, and lasting change
- When love inspires a transformation in sense-making, what are the epistemic and ethical implications?
- The key embodied features of love and the difference to desire, grasping, and craving, in attachment research
- The dark sides of transformative love, such as dependency, obsession, or idealisation
- Difficult transformations: love, grief, loss, and mourning
- Embodied love in activism, solidarity, reconciliation, and restorative justice
- Embodiment of love and its symbolism as a source of spiritual transformation
- Contemplative practices of any tradition that have love at their core. For instance, guru devotion, Yidam practices, inner heat practices in Tibetan Buddhism, the opening of the heart in Sufism, and the prayer of the heart in Christianity
- The intersubjective dimension of love in contemplative practices. For instance, the student-teacher embodied relation, the building of a spiritual community, and compassionate action
- Ordinary or extraordinary transformative experiences. The transformative power of love in daily life, for instance in childcare, gardening, and animal sanctuaries
- How transformation is relationally enacted. The embodiment of love in therapeutical relationship, transformative pedagogies, and mutual transformations
- More-than-human transformative experiences, for instance, love in human-animal interaction and deep ecology
- Love and lovemaking: sex and sexual imaginary as transformative experience
- The embodiment of love and relational virtues such as kindness and friendship
Contact Editors: Laura Candiotto and Christian Suhr
Deadline for submission: 31 January 2027
