True Lovers are as Rare as True Rebels

An Interview with Masha Tupitsyn

I first read Love Dog by Masha Tupitsyn on Tumblr, as it was being written. It was fascinating to watch it unfold, to try to guess where she might go next, waiting for each new post. This was writing (and images and videos) that explored love, but used love as way to interrogate philosophy, politics, and how we live today. A fragmented lens directed at so many of the conflicting aspects of our contemporary world. I had already read her earlier books, and was especially taken by LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, a text that used the concision of twitter towards critical ends, exploring the ways in which cinema both defines and works against cultural formation, how it is both a symptom and warning for the many ways we’ve collectively gone off the rails.

Reading Love Dog as a book, about one year after I had finished reading it on Tumblr, was like visiting an old friend, seeing how the work had since grown and developed. The internet opens up this space for new modes of critical writing, for a personal and theoretical immediacy that mirrors the experience of being on line, of having one’s words instantly received (and ‘liked’ and shared.) Other recent books also display the potency of this approach, for example: Heroines by Kate Zambreno (which began on her blog Francis Farmer Is My Sister) and 2500 Random Things About Me Too by Matias Viegener (first written on Facebook). It is certain we will be seeing much more of such literature, pages that first came to life on the web, and, with any luck, works by Viegener, Zambreno and Tupitsyn will form some of its seminal texts.

—Jacob Wren

THE BELIEVER: You’ve said that Love Dog is concerned with a radical love ethic and a feminist politics of love. Can you explain a little bit more what you mean by this?

MASHA TUPITSYN: As James Baldwin wrote, true lovers are as rare as true rebels. This has been a pivotal decree for me, and the quote makes a number of appearances in Love Dog. Baldwin makes an important correlation between love and rebellion. Not only is true love rare and true rebellion rare, real love is itself a radical form of rebellion—engagement, thinking, and being—and therefore happens in the context of a larger project of justice, liberation, and critical thinking. In the book, the stakes of love are co-intricated with the stakes of knowledge. This is why even though Love Dog is a web-based manifesto about love—a kind of digital, feminist follow-up to Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse—it is, like all...