Verwandte Artikel zu Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis

Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis - Hardcover

Kipnis, Laura

 
9780593316283: Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593316282 ISBN 13: 9780593316283
Verlag: Pantheon, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

In this timely, insightful, and darkly funny investigation, the acclaimed author of Against Love asks: 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 backdrop: 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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LAURA KIPNIS is a cultural critic and former video artist. She is the author of seven previous books, and her writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Slate, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Bookforum. Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern University, where she teaches filmmaking.

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1. LOVE AND EXTINCTION
 
If you’re reading this you recently survived a massive worldwide extinction event, congratulations. Too many didn’t. Have a nice big helping of residual simmering rage (so great for the immune system!) at being abandoned by our “leaders,” at the profiteers and incompetents and liars, at a cleverly murderous microscopic entity that wants to exploit you as a host and strip your organs for parts. Along with the grief about everything that was lost. About everyone who was lost.
 
On another but not entirely unrelated subject, how’s your love life? No doubt living through an extended planetary contagion will be infecting our relation to other people’s bodies and droplets for years or decades to come. A deadly virus alters your sense of what gets transmitted between people and what threats they pose, probably long after the pathogen itself gets beaten down (and apparently we’re not getting back to status quo existence anytime soon). Will the cultural afterlife of COVID-19 be as enduring as the long afterlife of AIDS, which reshaped consciousness about sex, love, and body fluids for decades, well after the HIV virus itself was subdued by medical science and a generation of new antiretroviral drugs made AIDS a chronic disease instead of a fatal one? As everyone not insane is hoping the new COVID vaccines will likewise do, fiendish mutations notwithstanding.
 
But it’s not just viruses that mutate, so do we. Our emotions mutate, our relationships mutate. Maybe our ideas about love and what we need or can realistically give another person have mutated. We’re different than we were before, including at the cellular level. We’re cohabiting with something malevolent—for how long? Everything important is uncertain. How much that shifts the interpersonal calculus is another of the unknowns: we live our lives in profile, we’re always catching up to ourselves, violent emotions descend from nowhere derailing you (they call it trauma)—but sure, let’s hope and pray that herd immunity and mass vaccinations will make life “normal” again, leaving just the political fractures and cultural hatreds and economic carnage to deal with.
 
History will obviously have more to say on these subjects, though what may not make it into the official record is how seemingly non-intimate public events—a sociopathic president, the imminent threat of infrastructural collapse—seep into your actual intimacies like runoff from a backed-up sewer, or that the imperiled condition of liberal democracy might mean that if it were ever possible to sustain a deep human connection between two individuals (a balancing act between intimacy and disgust in the best of times), feeling expendable isn’t especially conducive to the enterprise. It has ripple effects. It’s not as though love takes place in a bubble. To put it in social science-y language: “partnered bonding behaviors” along with “solo and partnered sexual behaviors” were not unaffected, even if you didn’t contract the actual disease. Factor in the residual symptoms for those who did. Factor in the economic hits, the loneliness (two-thirds of people said they felt more lonely, coupled or not), the protracted homeschooling ordeals and magnified household neurosis, or fill in your own particulars here. Is it only me or is there a lingering sense that other people feel, well . . . more encroaching than they used to, even post-vaccination? Just seeing news photos of milling unmasked strangers still gives the risk-averse agita. Do you find yourself recoiling from nearness, in public of course, but maybe in private too? It’s not just that other people’s variant-laden “aerosolized respiratory particles” might waft your way right as you’re inhaling, but once you committed to washing your hands a dozen times a day, now you’re a handwasher, right? It’s an ontological state, an internal cordon sanitaire. Women turned out to be more dedicated handwashers than men, by the way—gender is so insidious. Back when the virus hit and shutdown commenced, maybe you were coupled, maybe flying solo, maybe some covert or indecisive combination of the two, but when the music stopped we were all face-to- face with our romantic choices and compromises, like it or not. If solo, say hello to the voices in your head, you and they were going to be spending a lot of time together. For those who couldn’t endure that prospect there were improvised domestic pods and ad hoc “polycules,” platonic and otherwise. If previously coupled, say hello to your emotional bargains, in fact say hello to them twenty-four hours a fucking day, since 80 percent of the global workforce were furloughed or working at home. Anxieties and needs were ramped way up, often taking peculiar forms. A friend’s partner insisted on washing the lettuce with soap for a solid year, despite every new finding that “fomite transmission” was not a thing. Okay sure, lettuce has to be washed, but does it have to be washed with soap? Doesn’t it taste like soap no matter how much you rinse it? I wondered if the partner unconsciously wished to wash my friend’s mouth out with soap, and about all the other subterranean forms of interpersonal violence “the novel coronavirus” was providing cover for. What’s a rational precaution, what’s an irrational bulwark against the unknown, and what’s a thin excuse for payback? Wouldn’t lettuce washed with soap taste like a reprimand disguised as a salad? Like your contempt for me on a plate?
 
It’s in the nature of a plague that everything becomes allegorical; as in the Middle Ages, so too in the COVID years. There was so much to interpret: so many data points, so many fault lines, love foremost among them, whether you clung to it, quested for it, or just gave up. Humans invariably represent what’s invisible—love, pain, evil, death—in picturable ways, said C. S. Lewis. Freud called it displacement: why do we argue about how the dishwasher is loaded when the real outrage is that there’s been no sex for a month? (See his chapter on dishwasher-loading arguments in Cascade and Its Relation to the Unconscious.)
 
Let’s say you’d previously done the best you could at the coupling enterprise, balancing the loved one’s charms and solaces against their annoyances on an inner spreadsheet, engineering togetherness-regulation by means of “busy lives”—demanding jobs and hobbies and workouts, energetic socializing, kids, travel, maybe the occasional fling/flirtation/ online dalliance—along with couples therapy as required (if affordable). Sometimes polyamory worked, refreshed things. Or swinging—even evangelicals are doing it these days! Also “throuples.” Whatever the geometry, every couple is a finely tuned calibration of ambivalence and commitment, and whatever jerry-rigged solutions you’d previously engineered, COVID scrambled them, scrambled open marriages and secret trysts—if you’d been stepping out you’d better step back in, leaving distraught third parties to fend for themselves, as more than a few took to print to publicly complain about. (“We were planning a new life together. Now our only contact is a snatched phone call during his daily run.”) So long to work spouses and other supplements: all respites were going to be virtual at best if you had any compunctions, though maybe not everyone did (the adultery site Ashley Madison reported an immediate spike in new users during lockdown months).
 
Against the backdrop of sirens and existential dread,...

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Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593316282
ISBN 13 
9780593316283
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
PANTHEON
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/

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