Kipnis' Polemic Against Love

Laura Kipnis’ Against Love: A Polemic is indeed, as the Boston Globe review says, “smart, witty and withering.” Kipnis begins her polemic with a necessary reader advisory, something I kept referring back to when I began the book so I wouldn’t become to emotionally attached to her ideas. In this advisory, she asks whether our “uniformity of opinion” about love—the way in which we idealize it without questioning it as a social institution—is “a bit worrisome” (3), and thus justifies the need for a polemic against it. The purpose of a polemic such as this one, she says, is to “poke holes in cultural pieties and turn received wisdom on its head” (4). She calls the reader to proceed with her book in a “conflicted and contradictory spirit” (4). And so I did.

In her prologue, Kipnis puts the reader in what is presumably her position—wanting more than what has become the banal and mundane in a marriage, straying toward adultery. This second-person, fairly sarcastic narrative did allow me to read in a “conflicted and contradictory spirit,” and I found myself taking her seriously and reacting in protest at first. But reading in such an emotionally attached way didn’t really allow me to get a full grasp on how Kipnis’ voice fits into a larger third wave consciousness, so I soon abandoned my ferocious margin-scribbling and allowed myself to be a little more detached so as to grasp Kipnis’ frame of mind. After all, she did warn us not to take her too seriously and to recognize the purpose of a polemic. So I read on.

In chapter one, “Love’s Labors,” Kipnis discusses the “contradictions, large festering contradictions at the epicenter of love in our time” (13). She uses infidelity as the entry point to these contradictions, arguing that the divorce rate (among other things) in our country may be saying something about this universal, idealized concept that we have about love. She claims we have set standards for love, and that we have incorporated the Puritan work ethic into our relationships with the mantra “good marriages take work.” She goes so far as to say that wives, husbands and domestic partners are “choke-chained to the status-quo machinery” (19).

In this chapter, Kipnis takes a decidedly constructivist viewpoint, saying we’re “social creatures to a fault” (24), and argues that love is a social construction that promotes “cultural uniformity” (25). Her only solution thus far in the reading, however, seems to be adultery—she calls adultery “the nearest thing to a popular uprising against the regimes of contemporary coupledom” (28). She says that therapy/counseling and the mass media are perpetrators of this regime, socializing us all into functioning within the social structures that already exist instead of questioning the social structures themselves. Additionally, this regime is highly regulated and upheld at any cost.

At the end of the chapter, Kipnis mentions the physiological affects of “unplanned exposures” such as adultery—if I’m getting this right, I think she argues that when one’s socialized ideal of love (with a monogamous partner) and his/her practiced ideal of love (with someone other than the partner) don’t line up, ailments such as “insomnia, migraines, cold sore, digestive ailments, heart palpitations, and sexual difficulty” will arise (48). I found this particularly interesting in light of our discussion of pushing a body to its limits and body-reflexive practices. In this case, how much is the body responding to social expectations of it, and how much is the body’s own intrinsic limits?

In her second chapter, “Domestic Gulags,” Kipnis gives us more of the same, criticizing the way in which our society upholds the traditional love story. She disagrees with the way in which we uphold “mature relationships,” mature translated by her as “a depressing badge of early senescence and impending decreptitude” (58). She launches into a discussion of “couple linguistics 101,” quoting people on their answers to the question “What can’t you do because you’re in a couple?” What follows is 9 pages of answers, most of which I didn’t relate to. But perhaps that’s because of my age, and Kipnis says that the content doesn’t really matter. It’s the fact that the “operative word is can’t,” she says, and that marriage imposes this list of interdictions on the individual that matters. That, says Kipnis, is what makes marriage a “domestic gulag.” Our traditional love story emphasizes the process of falling in love and ends with marriage, she says, but doesn’t address what Kipnis sees as the more realistic question: “What the hell now?” (100).

I think Kipnis makes some relevant points, especially in debunking something that we see as universally good. However, I’m interested in coming to a more practical and balanced discussion in class as a result of our reading. I’m also curious about how Kipnis’ view reflects her social location—not in an attempt to be politically correct, but because race and class are essential parts of third wave discourse to me. bell hooks’ book All About Love poses another view of love, one where love can be transformed into justice and seen from many perspectives. How might these two opposing viewpoints reflect the individual experiences of their authors?