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Title: Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis ISBN: 0-375-42189-0 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 26 August, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.68 (25 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Love American style.
Comment: With divorce rates increasing by 30 percent since 1970, Laura Kipnis considers marital dissatisfaction to be a national epidemic in our country. Tossing one cherry bomb after the next at the institution of marriage, her book is not so much a polemic against love, as a brutally honest argument in favor of unconditional love and the pursuit of happiness outside the "domestic gulags" of marriage. Kipnis compares the love-takes-work ethic of marriage to industrial factory work, and entertains the possibility that "there could be forms of daily life based on something other than isolated households and sexually exclusive couples" (p. 179). She calls singles and adulterers "freedom fighters," who have escaped the barbed-wire fences of the Christian model of marriage so deeply ingrained within America, a nation we mustn't forget that was founded on a Declaration of Independence. Kipnis is an academic. Her book is smart and witty. The eight-page catalogue of things you can't do because you're in a couple, but sacrifices we nevertheless make for the sake of companionship and occasional sex (pp. 84-92), will leave more than a few readers questioning the point of romantic relationships altogether. By rattling a few convictions about married life, AGAINST LOVE succeeds at exactly what it sets out to do.
G. Merritt
Rating: 4
Summary: Polemic + humor = Engaging Reading
Comment: Reading Laura Kipnis' Against Love: A Polemic, is a guilty pleasure, like drinking an extra glass of wine at dinner. In a dazzling display of wit, social science, and chutzpah, Kipnis takes on the prevailing ideal of monogamy and makes a case that monogamy is not the not the blissful byproduct of a committed love-match, but a social contract that serves to police and oppress both parties involved. The heros of marriage, in Kipnis' view, are the adulterers, boldly striking out against chafing domestic bonds.
In the chapter titled, "Domestic Gulags," Kipnis rebuts the idea that lasting relationships are hard work. "When monogamy becomes labor, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with marriage as a domestic factory policed by means of rigid shop-floor discipline designed to keep the wives and husbands and domestic partners of the world choke-chained to the status quo machinery-is this really what we mean by a 'good relationship'?" (19). Kipnis holds up adultery as the acting-out of what our collective social unconscious already holds true. ". . . if adultery is a de facto referendum on the sustainability of monogamy-and it would be difficult to argue that it's not-this also makes it the nearest thing to a popular uprising against the regimes of contemporary coupledom (28). The current and rising levels of divorce and the increase in complicated extended family grouping (one expert calls it a family shrub instead of a family tree-because families now tend to grow horizontally, with exes and steps and ex-steps, etc.) are strong evidence that "contemporary coupledom" is a social institution changing before our eyes, while governments, politicians, and religious institutions continue to rely on an out-dated idea of marriage and simply encourage all the coupled to work harder . . . witness Louisiana's covenant marriage law.
Operating on this theory, Kipnis makes some salient points about our national obsession with the sex lives of politicians. While publicly upholding the virtue of holding to fidelity and marriage, many politicians were caught operating outside the bounds of their own marriages. Kipnis says, "What was a poor constituent to think? Maybe that dogged fidelity really isn't all it's touted to be? That out-dated vows should be rewritten, not just blindly reaffirmed (168)? She likens the politician-caught-with-his-pants-down phenomenon to politicians as players acting out our national unconscious and conscious confusion in "some new avant garde form of national political dinner theater." (30).
Social theory aside, Kipnis' descriptions of the process and feeling of entering an adulterous affair are dead on and extremely funny. Her first example involves hooking up at an academic conference, where she describes the interior monologue of the about-to-be adulterous player, " . . . you slowly become aware of a muffled but not completely unfamiliar feeling stirring deep within, a distant rumbling getting louder and louder, like a herd of elephants massing on the bushveld . . . oh God, it's your libido, once a well known freedom fighter, now a sorry, shriveled thing, from swaggering outlaw to model citizen, Janis Joplin to Barry Manilow in just a few short decades" (5).
Another point that rings true: at the heart of what makes adultery such a vibrant experience is that falling in love is not merely about loving the other, it's about rediscovering and falling in love again with oneself.
But love affairs can feel utterly transforming and how few opportunities there are to feel that way in normal life, which by definition militates against transformation. You get to surrender to emotions you forgot you could have: to desire and to being desired (how overwhelming that can feel when it's been awhile), and the thrill of the new thing, of course, but what really keeps you glued to the phone till all hours of the night is a very different new love object: yourself. The new beloved mirrors this fascinating new self back to you, and admit it, you're madly in love with both of them (132).
Kipnis' hilarious nine page listing of "What can't you do because you're in a couple" is worth reading aloud at dinner parties.
Does Kipnis really believe that adultery is the savior of marriage? While she uses all her intellectual powers and writerly charm to put together a compelling case, her main intent is to open a dialogue. One must know that the term polemic by definition is a one-sided argument, deliberately controversial in nature. As Kipnis says in her introduction, it's "designed to be the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z-Boy lounger" (4). Reading Against Love may rattle a few windows, and a few previously unexamined convictions as well.
Rating: 5
Summary: This book is speaking to me!!
Comment: Wow! How validating to read a book that articulates so beautifully how I feel about marriage and monogamy. Thank you, Laura, for making me feel less alone in my thoughts.
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Title: Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America by Laura Kipnis ISBN: 0822323435 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: January, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time by Stephen A. Mitchell, Margaret Black ISBN: 0393323730 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics by Laura Kipnis, Paul Smith ISBN: 0816619972 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: April, 1993 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Tales from the Clit: A Female Experience of Pornography by Cherie Matrix, Feminists Against Censorship, Cherie Martix ISBN: 1873176090 Publisher: AK Pr Distribution Pub. Date: November, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Platform by Michel Houellebecq ISBN: 0375414622 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 15 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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