Kate Zambreno

Being against love is a little like being against Christmas.

Sure, there are plenty of reasons for being against Christmas--mass consumerism, the poor unchristian children, the poor in general, anonymous men hiding behind cotton beards. And there are plenty of reasons for being against the modern state of coupledom, where people are expected to work on their relationship just as intensely as they punch in nine to five.

So sayeth Laura Kipnis, the Northwestern University professor of media studies and author of "Against Love: A Polemic" (Pantheon), a playful and provocative protest against this compulsory Noah's Ark, situating in a series of essays the adulterer as the heroic rebel in the marriage wars. Usually theory texts aren't terribly sexy, even if the text theorizes sex. There's actually nothing less sexy than dating an academic who brings up concepts like heteronormativity in bed. Or worse yet, Freud.

But here Kipnis has gone and written a book that prods at our last standing sacred cow, of Jack and Jenny sitting in a tree with his and her towels. It's hard not to get a rise out of her instigation, equal parts infuriating and inspiring. She writes:

So deeply internalized is our obedience to this capricious despot that artists create passionate odes to its cruelty; audiences seem never to tire of the most repetitive and deeply unoriginal mass spectacles devoted to rehearsing the litany of its torments, forking over hard-earned dollars to gaze enraptured at the most blatantly propagandistic celebrations of its power, fixating all hopes on the narrowest glimmer of its fleeting satisfactions. But if pledging oneself to love is the human spirit triumphal, or human nature, or consummately "normal," why does it require such vast PR expenditures?

Touché, Laura Kipnis. So are you saying that all this talk of love is instead a kind of pop pabulum, a simulated soup for the soul? And why are you trying to foul up such a lovely thing as love? Well, she's not, really. She claims the idea for the book came on a lark, an exercise where the form is as important as the content. The former video artist was chatting with Lauren Berlant of the University of Chicago a few years back, who was at the time editing an intimacy-themed issue of the journal Critical Inquiry. "We had been having a discussion about someone we both knew who had been caught numerous times having affairs, and I said as a joke, actually, 'Oh, I'll write about adultery,' and she said 'Great,'" she explains. "I then started thinking about writing in the point of view of the adulterer. I started thinking, what would be the interior life of someone who was living out that contradictory role in a sustained way?"

Kipnis has been getting all sorts of media attention because of her sticky subject. But she refuses in these interviews to talk about her own love life, and she really doesn't want to hear about yours. The day after our interview, she was scheduled for lunch with Debra Pickett, the perky columnist for the Sun-Times who takes people out to lunch for her column. You can just picture the conversation--"But what do you do on Valentine's Day?" met to zipped lips and a Marxist-loaded barb. Kipnis has been interviewed by media outlets all around the country and asked to wear the robe of Dear Abby advice columnist and Dr. Phil pop psychologist for the purpose of TV-friendly sound bites about her discontent with the many-splendored thing. ("Coming up after this word from our sponsors: A professor at Northwestern University has written a book claiming that adultery is actually a good thing. Could playing around be good for the heart?")

"My father has this joke about me that I'm always right ahead of something that breaks," Kipnis says. Her last book, "Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America," developed out of an essay about another lowbrow topic, Hustler magazine, that was published two years before "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" came out. "And then this book on love comes out, and it's getting treated as a book on marriage partly because like the Hillary thing just came out and...it's hit this panic-about-marriage moment."

"Against Love" flirts with the phenomenon of modern monogamy, tackling prescient topics such as the Clinton adultery scandal and debates over gay marriage. Kipnis realized her book was well-timed for the Zeitgeist. "So I knew I was hitting something but there's something else going on where I think everyone is desperate for something different to say about relationships and marriage and couples and I'm getting asked to supply some kind of advice or answer. People are trying to turn it into an advice book, and I don't have any advice," she laughs. "Hardly."

She doesn't have any answers, at all. None. To the question, what is love? Is it social construct? Ideology? Folk theory? Fast-acting virus? "For love?" she repeats. Doesn't she have a definition? "At one point my editor said to me, 'You have to define love,'" and I said 'No can do.'" She also doesn't offer an alternative to marriage. "I find myself saying things like, 'Well, I'm just the demolition guy, you don't ask the demolition guy to build the house.' Or come up with those idiotic things to say in the media."

So, "Against Love" is basically a tease. A damn tease. Kipnis is not against love, really. "When I thought of the title it just so broke me up I had to use it. The thought you're not allowed to say. But I think anybody reading the book would have to figure out it's not actually against love. But like I said, I just kind of became married to my title."

She's just for something else. "I think it's in favor of the idea of what else is there. At least asking the question, what else is there? I mean, I'm not opposed to the idea that love is an emotion that we experience, I think I say that in different places, but it's also something that's very malleable that gets utilized for various social purposes."

So go ahead. Fall in love. Laura Kipnis gives you permission. "I'm not trying to dissuade anybody from doing anything. It never occurred to me that I would be seen as trying to dissuade people."

As Freud once said--"I'm a total diehard Freudian. Freud's my God," Kipnis gushes, so she'll probably agree--the happiest are those with the most illusions.

And Merry Christmas, too.

Against Love: A Polemic

By Laura Kipnis

Pantheon, $24, 207 pages

(2003-10-02)

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