Against Love: A Polemic [Anglais] [Relié]

Less against love than against the cultural constraints that leads us to create wrong-headed ideas of love, this is book is the perfect antidote to any lingering social guilt about being happily single. Against Love: A Polemic will both shock and irritate, especially when you find yourself nodding your head in agreement while laughing at another broken taboo. Laura Kipnis (author of Bound and Gagged, Ecstasy Unlimited) clearly enjoyed writing this; she lets her wit run rampage over classic married situations and human emotions with results that include comparing adulterers to freedom fighters (using sharpened spoons to tunnel out from under love's barbed wire fences) and referring to tearful confessions of cheating as "funny little couple rituals." These make it fun, but the iconoclastic beauty is in her questions. How did good relationships come to be considered work instead of play? Why, unlike most of history and many other modern cultures, do Americans assume love and marriage go hand-in-hand? What lead to infidelity committed by public figures becoming a source of outrage? Kipnis doesn't have answers. Although urging us to have more compassion for our own desires, she expects her readers are smart enough to supply their own in response to her ideas. That attitude itself is a treat--if you're prepared to keep up through a complex whirlwind of Freud, Marx, Gingrich, Wollstonecraft, and several generations of pop culture. Jill Lightner

In this ragingly witty yet contemplative look at the discontents of domestic and erotic relationships, Kipnis (Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America) 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: "Aren't all adulterers amateur collagists? We're scavengers and improvisers, constructing odd assemblages out of detritus and leftovers: a few scraps of time and some dormant emotions...." With a razor-sharp intelligence and a gleeful sense of irony, Kipnis dismantles the myths of romance surrounding monogamy and makes the case for why adultery is a reasonable, often used, escape hatch. Kipnis is often most funny when at her most provocative ("Feel free to take a second to mull this over, or to make a quick call: `Hi hon, just checking in!' "), but even her moments of sarcastic humor can have a sobering effect, as when Kipnis considers the reasons behind the public's obsessive need for reading about real and fictional stories of spousal murders, noting that "perhaps these social pathologies and aberrations of love are the necessary fallout from the social conventions of love." Kipnis is adroit at detailing (sometimes with "notoriously unreliable" sexual self-reporting statistics) how our desire for fidelity is often at odds with basic human needs for personal freedom, and is terrific in dissecting how-or so Kipnis's case goes-"family values" politicians like Newt Gingrich fail miserably to live up to their own rhetoric. In the end, she concludes that adultery and fidelity have to exist side-by-side: "let's face it: purity always flirts with defilement." Kipnis balances her scintillating, on-target observations on straying with an honest sense of compassion for human experience.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kipnis has made it her mission to dismantle complacently held and culturally supported perspectives on such loaded subjects as pornography and, in this agilely argued, slyly insurgent performance, love itself. We hold domesticated love sacrosanct and base our social structure on the institution of marriage, Kipnis observes, yet we're wildly conflicted about the quotidian reality of coupledom and obsessed with adultery. Kipnis perfectly captures the emotional texture of both marriage and infidelity, often to painfully hilarious effect, but her primary focus is the intricate connections between domestic love and social order. She ponders the meshing of the work ethic with maintenance of monogamous relationships and marvels over the lucrative industries that thrive on coupledom disorders. Kipnis boldly discusses adultery as a form of protest against the smothering status quo and neatly analyzes our reactions to the sexual scandals of politicians, particularly Clinton's impeachment trial, a carnival of hypocrisy. Canny and articulate, Kipnis lures readers into musing over love's many facets, asking what love has to do with our avidity for control. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

?Laura Kipnis?s witty and cunning treatise against modern love is as trenchant and unexpected, as jubilantly incendiary a work of social criticism as I?ve read in years. It is an explosive pleasure.?
--Edward Hirsch

?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

?Deeply subversive, tough-minded, clear-thinking, provocative and shrewd, Against Love has the nerve to wonder out loud if marriage has evolved into an instrument of social control. Yet what?s so winning about Kipnis?s manifesto is its high-spirited lack of cynicism; she is not so much against love as for honesty.?
--James Atlas

“Will all the adulterers in the room please stand up?” So begins Laura Kipnis’s profoundly provocative and waggish inquiry into our never-ending quest for lasting love, and its attendant issues of fidelity and betrayal. In the tradition of social critiques such as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Against Love keenly examines the meaning and cultural significance of adultery, arguing that perhaps the question concerns not only the private dilemma of whether or not to be faithful, but also the purpose of this much vaunted fidelity.

With a novelist’s eye for detail, psychological acuity, and linguistic panache, Kipnis at once humorously and seriously explores the rules and rituals of modern coupledom and domesticity (from the establishment of curfews and whereabouts to actual searches and seizures), even as she deftly analyzes the larger power structures that they serve. She wonders: Might adulterers be regarded not only as sexual renegades but as unwitting social theorists posing essential political questions about the social contract itself? What is the trade-off between personal gratification and the renunciations society demands of us? And is “working at your relationship” just another way of propping up the work ethicæas if we weren’t all overworked enough as it is? If adultery is ultimately a referendum on the sustainability of monogamy, how credible is the basic premise of modern coupledom: that desire for your one and only love can and will persist through a lifetime of togetherness (despite so much evidence to the contrary)?

Against Love offers no easy answers. Rather it intends to engage you in a commonsensical and brave examination of the plight of the modern personality, caught between the vicissitudes of desire and the decrees of social conformity.

“Laura Kipnis’s witty and cunning treatise against modern love is as trenchant and unexpected, as jubilantly incendiary a work of social criticism as I’ve read in years. It is an explosive pleasure.”
--Edward Hirsch

“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

“Deeply subversive, tough-minded, clear-thinking, provocative and shrewd, Against Love has the nerve to wonder out loud if marriage has evolved into an instrument of social control. Yet what’s so winning about Kipnis’s manifesto is its high-spirited lack of cynicism; she is not so much against love as for honesty.”
--James Atlas

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 numerous essays and articles on sexual politics and contemporary culture both here and abroad.