#sry for lowkey hijacking this post id turn off rbs on my addition if i could LOL

[fortuneeater]

And it’s not simply coupling We have invented so many ways of hiding from the horrors of this world And from the ways we inhabit them daily, hourly. The couple is one form of hiding among many. This is the tone and mode of (not) engaging with the social that disgusts us. We feel the pull to be in a couple because everyone else is And this is the same pull that convinces us that We have to pay rent because everyone else does Or work for money because everyone else does Of course, history can swerve abruptly Such that we don’t know what landlords, bosses, or husbands are anymore. We’re into this. We want this moment to cum. Certain modes of relating can crack us open. I didn’t know I wanted to go up to the roof till you asked me. I didn’t know I wanted to be fucked in public till you asked me. I didn’t know I wanted to set a million dollars alight till you asked me. What we have found within our interactions with lovers The practice of paying attention to what quickens our breath Of noticing what arouses us Naming it, cultivating it, pursuing it We think this practice is ultimately connected to what will allow us to stop going to work, to take what we need. We are learning how to unleash our desires to the point that they rupture with capital We want to use them as weathervanes that point only Towards communism. And we think an emotional reflexivity, intelligence, and tenderness—what am I feeling? how can I describe it? how do my feelings affect how I interact with those around me?— Will be necessary for trusting each other Building the type of bonds that can pull us out of this world. Bonds long enough to sustain the growing of carrots and the expropriation of armaments. We’ve received some inquiries about the role of sex in struggle against the couple. We would like to clarify our position: We want to be slapped in the face when we cum To be penetrated in several orifices simultaneously To be fucked also by the intoxicating prose of women By the colors of the sun setting on this city. We would like to spend years touching every other part of your body besides your genitals. To spend years becoming intimate with our own physical dexterity Readying ourselves for the love, the riots that arrive unannounced. Under our breath, you can hear us humming: without god without law without husband free beautiful and crazy

Suturing the Split: Coda on the Couple-Form, Clémence x. Clémentine / infinite venom association

The couple functions as both the problem and its solution. If not this one, she just needs another boyfriend, one that will treat her better. A woman may feel the nausea of ambivalence, of being caught between obsession with phallic power and revulsion from it. She does not know which is greater, the melancholia of the couple or the melancholia of denouncing it as a social form. Most opt for the sadness of the couple over the alienation of being cut loose from its grasp. Capital lends a shoulder at every turn, suggesting you watch a rom com with your girlfriends when heartbroken or providing endless ways to personalize your wedding dress. Similar to the framework of electoral politics that limits the scope of critique to the wrong people being in office, the couple-form attributes women’s problems to dating the wrong man rather than to the couple itself. As long as she stays invested in the idea of romantic love as salvation, as the guiding principle against isolation and towards fulfillment, she remains tied to the couple-form.

As another facet of the couple-as-solution, the discourses surrounding austerity measures and neoliberal restructuring frame the couple as a remedy for poverty. One reads tales of young people shifting between poverty and prison as a result of single parenting, especially absent fathers, as if the restitution of the couple could remedy the poverty and structural racism produced by capitalism. State bureaucrats tell women that the couple and the family that it anchors have replaced social assistance programs: you don’t need help with childcare or food stamps; you need a man! The surest way out of poverty is to get married! While many women might never have access to employment, those who do work for a wage face a gendered discrepancy in earnings, likely forcing them to rely on male wages to support their children. These economic mechanisms preserve the vehemence of the couple-form as a trap for women within capitalism, which masks unwaged labor as acts of love and care.

[...]

The logic of the couple penetrates queer relationships as well as straight ones. Homonormativity and gay assimilation have fashioned queer relationships in the shape of straight coupledom. Rather than a subversion of heterosexual social relations, assimilationist, liberal homosexuals have fought for the right to fit into the logic of the couple — to get married, to wear a wedding dress, to create familial nuclei able to protect property relations. Homosexuals perpetuate heterosexual norms and phallocracy through categorizations and role-play, which further codify desires and constitute sex within the logic of phallic centrality and authority. Same sex couples do not escape either the territoriality imposed on desire or the couple’s reinforcement and faithfulness to repressive social relations.

Dismantling the logic of the couple does not indicate distaste for love, but rather a critique of directing love towards a specific object. One must contextualize the couple-form within patriarchy, as so-called ‘love’ arrives to us through the apparatus of gender. Denouncing the couple does not mean shunning giddiness, love letters written in tiny cursive with quill pens, or the feeling of the sidewalk being a trampoline. Rather, critiquing the couple involves an analysis of the way that patriarchy has recuperated women’s desire for solidarity, for intimacy, for excitement, for negation, for the event into a consolidation of phallic power and the accumulation of capital.

Who would not arrive at this conclusion: patriarchy and capitalism thwart any possibility to love in a way that liberates oneself from the logic of the couple or from one’s own oppression. To liberate love necessarily involves the abolition of patriarchy and capitalism. One cannot opt in or out of these structural relations, and the struggle against them will be a collective, historical project.

In this pathetic, stillborn world, we do have feelings. Sometimes we look at someone and think we are in love with them. We must crush the illusion that romance is or will be an avenue for liberation.

Against the Couple Form, Clémence X Clementine and Associates from the Infinite Venom Girl Gang