I’m sure some of you remember the moment in our Arnold-inspired academic politics discussion when I reminded Colin, in a doubtless irritatingly self-righteous manner, that not all positions of “oppositional politics” can be assumed to be the same. It was exactly that snarky affect that Against Love produced in me. Because, where “love” equals “marriage,” is it really as unthinkable as she constantly declares for us to be “against” it?
Only if we assume that there is one single possible way to be against love, and that way is from directly within it, from the position of the adulterer. If some choose not to choose “love,” if some choose something else (imagine this in the petulantly confrontational Scots of Renton’s opening monologue in Trainspotting)––whether by subscribing to different familial models than the white American bourgeois one that is Kipnis’s only reference point, or by trying against the odds to make up their own––well, they’re still subject to love’s propaganda, so they just don’t matter.
Early on, Kipnis promises “commitment-phobes” and proponents of “prolonged adolescent rebellion” that “there are a million stories in love’s majestic empire, and yours is in here too” (15). Well, I’ll spare you the personal narrative (ask me after class), but let me just say that mine wasn’t. And though I started off enjoying Kipnis’s rollicking polemic in spite of that niggling annoyance (she reminds me of Barbara Ellen, a columnist in the UK Guardian newspaper who always drives me mad and yet compells me to read), by the end my objections had grown too much to ignore.
Yes, I understand that she’s not writing for me. She’s writing for that nebulous monolith, “the mainstream.” But one of my reasons for wanting to theorize from and around geeky subcultures is my conviction that the mainstream has far more margins than most of those who speak to and for it would like to admit, and that what goes on in those margins is significant. For me, reading Kipnis was a profound validation of the importance of subcultural knowledge, of thinking from and through exceptions as well as rules. Because in refusing to even consider the possibilities of consciously nonnormative intimacy and desire, her arguments from the utopian prospects of adulterous love (which, by the way, I did find quite compelling) lost much of their force for me. By the time I got to the chapter on “politics,” with its narrow focus on “our” elected representatives and denial of any present political activity located on different ground, I was ready to throw the book across the room.
Like Jen, I was struck by the resonances of Kipnis’s discussions of labor and temporality with Halberstam’s work on “queer time” in Queer Time and Place. But, whatever problematics may exist around Halberstam’s privileging of particular subordinated life narratives, she is writing about things that happen here and now. The only alternatives to compulsory monogamy and adulterous resistance Kipnis is willing to entertain are located safely in the past: in nineteenth-century debates on the “naturalness” of monogamy, in the apparently long-defeated sexual liberationism of the 1960s (179-181). She declares adultery to be a utopian project, implicitly political in its resistance to publicly hegemonic modes of intimacy; but she refuses to recognize that there are any explicitly political, purposefully utopian models of intimacy and relation that exist in the here and now.
Nobody but Kipnis ever understood that personal lives have political implications, apparently. Never mind the feminist critiques of gendered power in domesticity on which her argument relies, and which she disavows in favor of her multiple declarations that gender doesn’t matter any more because men are unsatisfied in marriage too (16); any possibility that all queer people are not happily campaigning for marital equality as the only political end worth achieving is quickly shoved aside in her one footnoted reference to Michael Warner (152).
This is my counterpolemic to Kipnis (and I hope I haven’t stepped on the toes of anyone whose actual turn it was to respond this week). I suspect that I actually have more time for her arguments than some of the other counterpolemicists, and I will probably find myself defending her in class. (As in the matter of dead baby theory, I’m with Alex on the value of this work.) I think my problem with Against Love may fundamentally rest on my wanting it to be a different book than it is, a book which would highlight multiple lived alternative models of intimacy and kinship even as it rails against the normative one, which would recognize its radical feminist and queer forebears, the significance of class and racial difference to its arguments. But if that book exists outside of my head, it certainly wouldn’t have made the “Best book of the year” lists that Kipnis’s did; and perhaps that’s the core of my dissatisfaction with her arguments, after all.
Alexis
