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On Marriage

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Of course, to recognise this, to look inwards, you need to be feeling insecure in some way, notes Baum — “the main thing fascism sets itself up against is introspection, The fascist condemns that person who looks inwards to wonder who they really are.” It is why, she explains, the interrogation of the self is such familiar trope in Jewish literature. Everything you thought you knew about conjugal beds, secrets, feuds, confessions, triangulations and solaces will be pleasurably complicated by Devorah Baum’s wryly insightful tell-all regarding the infinite perversity of marriage—including her own, mine, and probably yours.”—Laura Kipnis, author of Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis This is not so much a cop-out as a recognition of the fact that marriage, for all its legal and social connotations, remains the ultimate subjective experience. For anyone who has experienced, contemplated or rejected it, On Marriage offers a fascinating exploration of an institution that, for better or worse, “continues to shape and carry our human story”. Drawing on philosophy, film, fiction, comedy, psychoanalysis, music and poetry, Devorah Baum considers the marriage plot. What are we really talking about when we talk about marriage? And what are we really doing when we say, 'I do'? The Jewish Joke (Profile Books) also came out in 2017 and has been the subject of radio and press interviews (e.g. for ABC radio in Australia) and the focus of public events where I’ve been in conversation with comedians (such as David Baddiel, David Schneider and John Fugelsang). I’ve also lectured on joking and comedy at various events, including a lecture for The Freud Museum’s conference ‘Beyond The Joke’(May 2019) and keynotes at the annual conference of the International Society for Heresy Studies at Senate House (June 2018) and UCL’s Institute of Advance Studies conference on ‘Laughter’ (July 2019). I have also presented three short informal talks on joking - and i) politics ii) religion and iii) sex - for the online publishing platform EXPeditions (all available both as video and transcript).

As amusing as the film is, it nevertheless asks questions of the modern world we allinhabit, not just neurotic, bourgeois types with a foot in the worlds of academia and/or film production. “How does a man, especially a white educated privileged straight man, how does he appear in storytelling?” Josh asks, articulating a 21 stCentury dilemma. “How does he appear on screen? What is it we want to hear from that guy? Or do we wanna hear from him at all?” On the subject of conversation and its role in marriage Baum is . . . at her most resonant. . . . This is smart and right. . . . There is more in marriage than may be dreamt of in our philosophies.”—Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street JournalThe result was moving, relatable and very honest — as is Husband, the sort of openness that takes courage, I suggest. Still, hard not to feel for Sartre’s democrat. Unwitting accomplice of genocidal fascism he may be, but in his own mind he’s a utopian who would speak in the name of a universal humanity – an understandable wish, especially when global catastrophe threatens.

And a certain privilege is no doubt necessary to engage in the kind of exploration of marriage that is Baum’s comparative advantage. If a parent is struggling to maintain the means to support a child, she is less likely to take pleasure in considering, as Baum does in a chapter titled “Creative Accounting,” the contradictory manner in which a child at once confirms a couple’s identity “by naturalizing their relation and proving its profitability according to the accumulative logic of capital” and “subtracts from the unity of the whole by adding its own difference.” At the same time, Kearney’s bloodless analysis can invite subversion of the sort that Baum might encourage. If, as Kearney argues, two parents are demonstrably better than one at maximizing outputs in the form of successful children, does it not follow that adding yet more parental figures into the mix—a stepparent here, a queer known donor there—might lead to still more impressive results? The biblical command to marry is expressed in terms of leaving your parents’ house and cleaving to your spouse. And the psychodrama of marriage seems very bound up with that confusion about where and to whom one belongs when one makes that transition. Somehow the person you choose has the job of taking you out of your comfort zone, which puts them, structurally, in constant competition with your family, no matter how much they may in fact like your family. So while at first you think you’re going to just repeat your own family set-up with someone new, soon you realise you’re going to have to reinvent this institution – marriage – between yourselves. It’s what makes tradition potentially so creative. Feelings - especially 'negative' feelings; feelings as framed by modernity/history, technology, literature, art, film and psychoanalysis. This is the second time this couple have bravely interrogated their relationship on screen. Husband is the unofficial sequel to The New Man, which they co-directed and co-produced in 2016, about their experience as expectant parents. We did have a lot of anxiety early on about being not serious enough subjects for cinema, but since making the film I’ve concluded: ‘let the work speak for itself – if it reaches people great, if not, fine.’ And by the end of the process I felt the film vindicated itself, partly because of something it’s also about: the urge to create. So, even if we don’t look like serious subjects, we still have a serious desire to create – and that’s to some extent a message that our film could only convey by being in other ways not serious. While in terms of my relationship, I think I’ve learned to respect Josh more. I’ve learned now that when he says he’s up to something, he probably is.What do I know about marriage? I have a those-who-can’t curiosity about the subject, and a sense that I look to art and culture as a way of making sense of the world, perhaps even for a suggestion of (if possible) optimism. There is one conclusion in particular I will take from reading Baum’s book: ‘the one constant I’ve noticed that marriage does seem unusually good for, both in theory and in practice, is playing host to contradictions.’ I say that marriage doesn’t work for anyone, but walking into contradictions feels like a worthwhile human endeavour. I’m not saying I will marry again, but I am willing to look at the establishment with a conciliatory tone. Not because I need it to work (for me or for others) but because in the history of people attempting connection with one another, marriage is the narrative Eliot, Shakespeare, Bergman et al. have dealt with. But when confronted with the question “ What do intellectuals think of marriage?” Baum concludes that most philosophers have preferred to avoid the subject. Is marriage then an intellectual blind spot? To fill in the gaps, she draws on a wide range of cultural material, from the classical to the contemporary, while interweaving reflections on her own experiences of matrimony to both critique and celebrate marriage’s many contradictions and its profound effects on us all. In doing so, she reveals how marriage has worked as a cover story for power and its abuses on the one hand, and for subversive and even utopian relational practices on the other. Josh sees me at my least made-up, my least attractive, and yet he’s the one who needs to feel attracted to me. And we’re both quite slovenly people. So one thing couples often do is have ‘date nights’ when they go out into the world together. And in that outing the eye of the world acts as a third character in their relationship: a character that’s intrinsic to the sexuality of their relationship. So yes, the element of exhibitionism can probably add a kind of interest.

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