Through exquisitely rigorous discourse analysis, Todor 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 historical, modern, factual, and fictional sources, Critical Theory and Marital Quarrels: Dynamics of Passionate Speech brilliantly illuminates the discursive relations and conditions from which squabbles arise.

Clare Birchall, King's College London

In an age when mindless verbiage has become the norm, it is refreshing to read Hristov’s painstaking elucidation of the valences of contentious speech. With analytic rigor and lucidity, he demonstrates how even the most ordinary of linguistic acts can generate abstract questions that demand the skilled unpacking of an entire discursive economy, what Hristov calls a social unconscious. Marital quarrels serve here as the test site for historically evolving issues of sovereignty, government, freedom, rational choice, sanity, passion, and other kinds of situational discord. This is an impressive scholarly undertaking with far-reaching reverberations.

Rey Chow, author of A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present

This book provides a fascinating discussion of marital quarrels—those moments of domestic debate that usually go under the radar of critical analysis, but which are the focus of attention for so many marriage therapy sessions. Drawing on a wide range of critical theorists, Hristov’s study is full of arresting insights into the linguistic labyrinths of marriage.

Peter Knight, University of Manchester

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

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, Maxwell C. Weiner Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, Missouri University of Science and Technology