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There is a lot to be cynical about. The planet’s climate is changing faster than our solutions for managing it. Wars on multiple continents have left millions of people displaced or dead. Creeping authoritarianism. Given the state of global affairs, one might wonder if people have soured on something as idyllic as love. In the fall, Todd McGowan, professor of film studies, devoted his class, “Love and the Romantic Comedy,” to find out if students do really believe in love, and could reach a collective answer. 

One December morning, McGowan strides across the floor of a large classroom in Innovation Hall in running shoes, jeans, and a long black sleeve shirt with the words “LACK” circled in white—paraphernalia for an organization he co-founded that explores psychoanalytic theory in the vein of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan. McGowan is slim and bald and begins the 100-person class with a mix of jokes, often at his own expense.  

McGowan is a prolific writer (he has published 16 books and has three more under contract) who theorizes widely: Hegel and identity politics, to free will and comedy. Humor is an excellent delivery method for such topics and allows students to participate in what could be an intimidating space. 

The class discussion wends between the films Groundhog Day and Glengarry Glen Ross and examination of the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s ideas in the book The Agony of Eros. McGowan advances to a slide with a Han quote, “In a world of unlimited possibilities, love itself represents an impossibility,” which kicks off debate concerning dating apps and capitalism.

“In a world of unlimited consumption, all these distractions get in the way of love,” one student suggests.  

“On Amazon you can buy anything except a person to love,” McGowan muses. “Everything else is possible.”

Dating apps give the illusion of the endless swipe of possibilities, another student offers.  

“Are we the victims to a culture that has no limits? No mystery?” McGowan asks. “Love requires lack. That’s why I am wearing this shirt today.”

“Love is a disruption of the everyday… it is what allows us to transcend our everyday existence and find a value that is not reducible to exchange or use.”

Class ends and McGowan still has at least a dozen slides left to show that he promises to post online. 

“I never reteach a class. Ever. Ever,” McGowan says afterwards. “So, this is the one time…I shouldn’t say that. Because people have really liked it. So, if I did it again, I would just do all different movies and all different books. But basically, I have never retaught a class. It’s not fun.”

Student demand is what drove him to create “Love and the Romantic Comedy” in the first place. Each semester he queries students for ideas “and then I do it,” McGowan says.

He also co-hosts “Why Theory,” a podcast he and Ryan Engley M.A. ’14, assistant professor of media studies at Pomona College, launched six years ago to explain cultural phenomena using psychoanalytic theory. 

“When we started it, we thought ‘oh, 20 people will listen in,’” McGowan says. “And that would be fine.” 

But “Why Theory” has more than 2,000 followers and most episodes have upwards of 15,000 plays on SoundCloud. While most listeners are graduate students and professors, people outside academia have stumbled across it and begun engaging in conversations with the hosts.

“And they ask questions and that helps germinate certain lines of thinking,” McGowan says. 

These days he is thinking about (and writing) three books. One is titled The Capitalist Excess; another, Embracing Alienation, argues against viewing alienation as something to be overcome. The last book is Radical Hegel, in which McGowan proposes that “instead of trying to change the future we need to change the past.” 

He is not suggesting we can go back in time and change historical events. But he does believe we can look at the past and re-examine what we consider to be important. For instance, perhaps we think of people like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass as some of the founders of America, he says. “What if we asked ‘who were the real figures of say, equality or freedom?’ … I don’t think history weighs on us in the way we think it does. I think it’s always possible to reinterpret the past and then change its effect on us.”

The next week an email arrives. McGowan’s students have come to consensus about love.

“They all gravitated to the theory from one of the authors we read—Mari Ruti,” he writes. “Her idea is that love is a disruption of the everyday, that it is what allows us to transcend our everyday existence and find a value that is not reducible to exchange or use.”

McGowan admits that people who believe in love may be more likely to sign up for the class. 

But does he believe in love?

“Absolutely,” he says with a smile. “Totally believe in love. I like this idea of falling in love. That love is a falling out of your everyday and it disrupts your given ways of being and forces you to think about another person and get out of your own self… I think that you are able to, through love, find something about yourself that you otherwise couldn’t. But the point is, you’re not focused on yourself.”