Kipnis - Against love : a polemic

Acclaim for Laura Kipniss AGAINST LOVE

Wonderfully clever, deliciously written. Kipnis blends journalistic pizzazz and philosophical nerve. Whether you agree or not, Kipniss crackling colloquial style keeps Against Love rollicking forward, often hilariously. Its hard to imagine even the fiercest champion of wedded bliss not enjoying the provocations of this book.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

If you think of family values as something more, better and different from simply loving the people in your family, avoid this book for fear of apoplexy.

The Washington Post

Reading Against Love, I felt invigorated half the time and plunged into the deepest, most morose pit of self-pitying despair the rest of itin other words, I felt as if I were in love. This seems to have been Kipniss aim.

Stephanie Zacharek, Salon

In this ragingly witty yet contemplative look at the discontents of domestic and erotic relationships, Kipnis combines portions of the slashing sexual contrarianism of Mailer, the scathing antidomestic wit of early Roseanne Barr and the coolly analytical aesthetics of early Sontag. With a razor-sharp intelligence and a gleeful sense of irony, Kipnis dismantles the myths of romance surrounding monogamy.

Publishers Weekly

Wittily invigorating. [Kipnis] possesses the gleeful, viperish wit of a Dorothy Parker and the energetic charisma of a cheerleader. She is dead-on about the everyday exhaustion a relationship can produce.

Slate

A person would need a heart of stone not to rejoice at the drubbing [Kipnis] delivers. Funny and astute much of the writing is informed and bracing, amplifying ideas about social control derived from Engels, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Raymond Williams, Foucault, and Adam Phillips.

Chicago Tribune

[Kipnis is] a talented social satirist.

The Weekly Standard

Against Love is a wonderfully provocative book, daring and incisive, written with verve and no small amount of humor. It raises a thousand questions most of us lack the courage to ask, about domestic life and even the meaning of the human enterprise, while remaining at every instant a delight to read.

Scott Turow

Kipniss treatise reads like a brisk, sophisticated novel about the beginning, middle, and end of an adulterous affair. [A] bravura book.

The Times Literary Supplement (London)

This book is trouble and the worst thing is that Kipnis is so convincing. A vastly entertaining and smart work of social criticism. Kipnis demonstrates her brilliance at the [polemic] form playing a heretic in the chapel of love. An unsettling and witty deconstruction of love and marriage.

NPR, Fresh Air

Laura Kipnis

AGAINST LOVE

Laura Kipnis is a professor of media studies at Northwestern University. She has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has published many essays and articles on sexual politics and contemporary culture both here and abroad.

ALSO BY LAURA KIPNIS

Bound and Gagged:
Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America

Ecstasy Unlimited:
On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2004

Copyright 2003 by Laura Kipnis

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions previously appeared in Critical Inquiry, Harpers, and
The New York Times Magazine.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Kipnis, Laura.
Against love : a polemic / Laura Kipnis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Adultery. I. Title.
HQ806.K48 2003
306.736dc21
2003042022

eISBN: 978-0-307-51074-7

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To the only begetter

Shakespeare, Sonnets

Please fasten your seatbelts: we are about to encounter contradictions. The subject is love, and things may get bumpy.

To begin with, who would dream of being against love? No one. Love is, as everyone knows, a mysterious and all-controlling force, with vast power over our thoughts and life decisions. Love is boss, and a demanding one too: it demands our loyalty. We, in turn, freely complyor as freely as the average subject in thrall to an all-powerful master, as freely as indentured servants. Its a new form of mass conscription: meaning its out of the question to be summoned by love, issued your marching orders, and then decline to pledge body and being to the cause. Theres no way of being against love precisely because we moderns are constituted as beings yearning to be filled, craving connection, needing to adore and be adored, because love is vital plasma and everything else in the world just tap water. We prostrate ourselves at loves portals, anxious for entry, like social strivers waiting at the ropeline outside some exclusive club hoping to gain admission to its plushy chambers, thereby confirming our essential worth and making us interesting to ourselves.

But is there also something a bit worrisome about all this uniformity of opinion? Is this the one subject about which no disagreement will be entertained, about which one truth alone is permissible? (Even cynics and anti-romantics: obviously true believers to the hilt.) Consider that the most powerful organized religions produce the occasional heretic; every ideology has its apostates; even sacred cows find their butchers. Except for love.

Hence the necessity for a polemic against it. Polemics exist to poke holes in cultural pieties and turn received wisdom on its head, even about sacrosanct subjects like love. A polemic is designed to be the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z-Boy lounger. It wont injure you (well not severely); its just supposed to shake things up and rattle a few convictions. Be advised: polemics arent measured; they dont tell both sides of the story. They overstate the case. They toss out provocations and occasionally mockery, usually because theyre arguing against something so unquestionable and deeply entrenched its the only way to make even a dent in the usual story. Modern love may be a company townit may even come with company housing (also known as domesticity)but are we such social marionettes that we automatically buy all usual stories, no questions asked?

Please note that against is also a word with more than one meaning. Polemics arent necessarily unconflicted (nor are the polemicists); rhetoric and sentiment arent always identical twins. Thus, please read on in a conflicted and contradictory spirit. Such is the nature of our subject.

Would you like to dance? Youve mustered all the studied casualness you can, momentarily convincing yourself (self-deception is not entirely unknown in moments such as these) that your motives are as pure as the gold of your wedding band, your virtue as eternal as your mortgage payment schedule. This small act of daring accomplished, your body now pressed nervously against this