Critical Theory and Marital Quarrels: Dynamics of Passionate Speech analyzes the pneumatics of conflict through a discursive archeology of police reports, court proceedings, psychiatric cases, therapy sessions, eighteenth-century relationship advice literature, and the nineteenth-century fiction. Todor Hristov argues that in order to extract knowledge from the noise of the marital fights, preachers, moralists, physicians, alienists, sociologists discarded the words as a slag, and in consequence, they were unable to explain either the recurrence or the power of discord. This study is intended as an analysis of the discursive mechanism of contentious speech based on concepts derived from critical theory, discourse analysis, speech act theory and semiotics. The discursive mechanism of quarreling is summed up in the concept of passionate speech relevant beyond family scenes, to scenes of political or public contention. This book applies the concept to examine critically the language of contemporary couples therapy and to describe the unintended effects of the passions shared by the clients and the therapists.
Todor Hristov teaches critical theory at the University of Sofia and biopolitics and governmentality studies at the University of Plovdiv.
This is critical theory at its best: an endlessly inventive, impressively erudite, and painstakingly minute examination of a contentious region of social life that few philosophers have dared to tread until now. Anyone who wants to understand why we quarrel the way we do should read Hristov's polemology of everyday life, which manages the remarkable balancing act of being both compassionate and deadpan funny. --Alejandro Romero-Reche, University of Granada Through exquisitely rigorous discourse analysis, Hristov illuminates a genre of conflict that usually happens behind closed doors: the marital quarrel. While recognizing the socially situated nature of such encounters, this book's primary focus is not anthropological. Rather, drawing on an impressive array of sources, both historical and modern, factual and fictional, Critical Theory and Marital Quarrels brilliantly illuminates the discursive relations and conditions from which squabbles arise. --Clare Birchall, King's College London Todor Hristov skillfully and rigorously leads us through the quotidian phenomenon of the marital quarrel, showing the revolutionary potential of taking each other's noise seriously. In these increasingly contentious times, this book is an invitation into listening and a refreshingly original study of its ethical force. --Margret Grebowicz, Missouri University of Science and Technology
