Laura Kipnis Books

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics is devoted to educating the general public about the history, current trends, and possibilities of culture and politics.

A polemic against love that is “engagingly acerbic ... extremely funny.... A deft indictment of the marital ideal, as well as a celebration of the dissent that constitutes adultery, delivered in pointed daggers of prose” ( The New Yorker).Who would dream of being against love? No one. Love is, as everyone knows, a mysterious and all-controlling force, with vast power over our thoughts and life decisions.But is there something a bit worrisome about all this uniformity of opinion? Is this the one subject about which no disagreement will be entertained, about which one truth alone is permissible? Consider that the most powerful organized religions produce the occasional heretic; every ideology has its apostates; even sacred cows find their butchers. Except for love.Hence the necessity for a polemic against it. A polemic is designed to be the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z-Boy lounger. It won’t injure you (well not severely); it’s just supposed to shake things up and rattle a few convictions.

In this timely, insightful, and darkly funny investigation, the acclaimed author of Against Love what does living in dystopic times do to our ability to love each other and the world?COVID-19 has produced new taxonomies of love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Will its cultural afterlife be as lasting as that of HIV, which reshaped consciousness about sex and love even after AIDS itself had been beaten back by medical science? Will COVID end up making us more relationally conservative, as some think HIV did within gay culture? Will it send us fleeing into emotional silos or coupled cocoons, despite the fact that, pre-COVID, domestic coupledom had been steadily losing fans?Just as COVID revealed our nation to itself, so did it hold a mirror up to our relationships. In Love in the Time of Contagion, Laura Kipnis weaves (often hilariously) her own (ambivalent) coupled lockdown experiences together with those of others and sets them against a larger the politics of the virus, economic disparities, changing gender relations, and the ongoing institutional crack-ups prompted by #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, mapping their effects on the everyday routines and occasional solaces of love and sex.

Traditori non si nasce, si diventa. Una analisi acuta, provocatoria e divertente delle conseguenze sociali, positive e negative, della «infedeltà». Ovvero, del «tradimento». Insomma, dell'adulterio in una coppia che si è giurata, una volta, eterno amore. Un'opera-parafulmine insieme concreta e utopistica, che ha già fatto discutere molto, destinata, anche da noi, a suscitare un vespaio di polemiche.

Wie konnte sich das Wort „Beziehungsarbeit“ in unseren Alltag schleichen - wo ist nur die Lust geblieben? Warum wandelte sich das Heim in einen emotionalen Gulag? Wieso überhäufen sich Paare mit Einschränkungen persönlicher Freiheiten, sodass man versucht ist, die Genfer Konventionen auf den Plan zu rufen? Hatten wir nicht von Liebe gesprochen? Laura Kipnis zeigt, wie gern wir uns selbst belügen, wenn es um Liebe geht. Hinter ihrer witzigen und bissigen Polemik aber steht ihr großer Wunsch: die Liebe aus der Zwangsjacke zu befreien. Ein erfrischendes Plädoyer für den Mut zur Veränderung und ein Appell, das persönliche Lebens-Lustprinzip nicht aufzugeben.

Beschrijving van de vrouwelijke psyche aan de hand van een viertal primaire gebieden.