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Omid Bagherli is a graduate student in English and 2024–25 Dissertation Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. His work focuses on representations of thwarted historical recovery and redress in contemporary literature and film.

Bobby Benedicto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University.

Tim Dean is the James M. Benson Professor in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking and, most recently, Hatred of Sex (coauthored with Oliver Davis). He is completing a book titled After Pandemics: COVID-19, AIDS, and the Literature of PrEP.

Sandip K. Luis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History & Art Appreciation at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He teaches critical theory and historiography, focusing on modernism and global contemporary art. Luis received a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has taught at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi, and the University of Kerala. His areas of research and publication include the theories of the avant-garde, biennials, and historiography of contemporary art.

Josephine Taylor is Postdoctoral Fellow in Energy Narratives and Coastal Communities at University College Dublin. Her research is in environmental humanities and she is currently working on her first monograph on Nonhuman Narratives of Energy, contracted with Palgrave Animal and Literature Series. She has published in the areas of science fiction, petroculture, gender and affect theory. She is also a member of the research collective Beyond Gender, which carries out joint projects focused on queer and feminist science fiction.

Federico Pous is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University, and works on the politics of memory, human rights, and contemporary social movements in Latin America and Spain. He published Eventos carcelarios (UNC Press 2022), about the experience of political prisoners during the 1970s in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil; and co-edited the volume, Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), about Paraguayan cultural history and the status of democracy in this country.

Tom Roach is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Coordinator of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the Department of History, Literature, and the Arts at Bryant University. He is the author of Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (SUNY Press, 2012) and Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era (SUNY Press, 2021). Recent publications include an essay in differences on Leo Bersani’s concept of fascination and a chapter in Political Philosophies of Aging, Dying, and Death (Taylor and Francis, 2021) on the political function of death in the work of Michel Foucault.

John Paul Ricco is Professor of Comparative Literature, Visual Studies, and Art History at the University of Toronto, where he is Lead Curator of the Sexual Representation Collection at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. He is a theorist working at the juncture of contemporary art, queer theory, and philosophy, noted for his work on aesthetics and ethics; sexuality and intimacy; and eco-deconstruction. Ricco has coedited special issues of Parallax and Journal of Visual Culture on Jean-Luc Nancy, and most recently, a special issue of differences on Leo Bersani. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, and The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (both University of Chicago Press) and has just completed the third volume in his trilogy on “the intimacy of the outside,” titled Queer Finitude.

Austin Svedjan is a doctoral student and Hamilton-Law Graduate Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Their dissertation project traces the concept of “bad sex” across popular literary objects like the sex manual, the prizewinning novel, and the feminist manifesto in the long twentieth-century as it intersects with adjacent discourses of eugenics, aesthetic education, and sexual liberation. Austin’s writing appears or is forthcoming in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, ASAP/J, among others.

Mikko Tuhkanen is Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where he teaches African American and African-diasporic literatures, LGBTQ+ literatures, and literary theory. He is the author of, among other books, The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright (2008) and The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani (2018). He is the editor of Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond (2014) and Fascination and Cinema, a special issue of Postmodern Culture (2020); as well as the coeditor, with E. L. McCallum, of The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014) and Queer Times, Queer Becomings (2011). His other publications include essays in PMLA, diacritics, differences, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, James Baldwin Review, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing two book-length studies: “Time’s Witness: On James Baldwin” and “Some Speculation: Thinking with Pet Shop Boys.”

Robyn Wiegman is Professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University and author of Object Lessons (2012), American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), and numerous anthologies that focus on the institutional and political formation of identity knowledges. Her editorial work includes special issues on “Autotheory,” “Queer Theory Without Antinormativity” and “Sexual Politics, Sexual Panics,” which won the best special issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2019. She is the former director of Women’s Studies at both Duke and UC Irvine.

Robyn Wiegman (bio)

Abstract

Is “queer now to be taken as delineating political rather than erotic tendencies?” Leo Bersani laments in Homos, his 1985 text that helped launch his reputation as the god father of queer theory’s now famed anti-social thesis. For Mikko Tuhkanen, Bersani’s critique of queer theory and its reverberations engender a crucial distinction: Bersani is forever “a queer thinker,” not a “queer theorist.” Reading with Tuhkanen’s distinction, this essay explores Bersani’s investment in queer thinking as a mode of anti-institutional critical practice in order to track the centrality of the conflict between the political and erotic in the past and present work of queer scholarship.

Who among us doesn’t know that Leo Bersani was a master of the opening line, a provocateur when it came to puncturing whatever had settled too comfortably in arguments about sex, culture, or art? His now famous 1987 salvo from “Is the Rectum a Grave?” is easiest to remember, in part because it eviscerated the prospect of sex as a domain of intimate connection and redemption: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it” (197). Other rhetorical initiations are equally arresting. Take the first words of “The Gay Outlaw”—”Betrayal is an ethical necessity”—initially published (people often forget) in a 1994 special issue of Diacritics edited by Judith Butler and Biddy Martin (5).¹ Or the revision that essay would undergo before appearing as the final chapter of Homos (1995), the book that would solidify Bersani’s status as the godfather of the antisocial thesis: “Should a homosexual be a good citizen?” (113).² In the first case, Bersani is taking on the deeply homophobic culture of sex that enveloped the first deadly decade of HIV-AIDS and its genocidal equation of disease with homosexuality while arguing for sex as the ecstatic scene of the self’s psychic decomposition.³ In the second, he is leading his reader into a meditation on Jean Genet’s vexed reputation as an outlaw and toward the ethical necessity, for critical practice as much as social life, of “breaking with all familiar connections,” as he would retrospectively put it in a now famous interview with Mikko Tuhkanen in 2014 (“Rigorously” 280). In the third, Bersani establishes what will be his lifelong rejection of gay liberation’s populist equation of freedom with citizenship and the “responsibilities” it demands in intimacy (marriage and monogamy), money (property and taxes), and armed national service (military).

On the face of it, these critical itineraries are a near perfect match for the antinormative instincts that nurtured the emergence of queer theory as a named field for academic activism.⁴ And yet, by the time he wrote the introduction to Homos, Bersani felt the need to issue a warning about queer theory’s self-declared triumph over what it perceived—and perceives still—as the narrow and exclusive identitarian politics that attends homosexuality. To be sure, both Diacritics and the London Review of Books published reviews of Homos in 1996 that sketched, with differing mixtures of affirmation and disagreement, the distance Bersani put between himself and the work being promoted as queer theory in the early 1990s, which tended to emphasize performativity and with it resignification as the holy grail for wrestling sexuality and desire from the psychic and social strongholds of compulsory heterosexuality and its heteronormative supports.⁵ Bersani’s challenge to the emerging consensus begins, unsurprisingly, in the introduction’s opening line. “No one,” he writes, “wants to be called a homosexual”—not “straights,” not “closeted gay men and lesbians who fear, rightly or wrongly, personal and professional catastrophe,” not even “self-identified homosexual activists and theorists” (Homos 1). Bersani generates a few names as evidence—Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, and Michael Warner—in order to specify Homos‘s most polemical point: that queer theory’s embrace of a deconstructive, anti-essentialist commitment to social construction erased gayness in favor of a de-sexualized political affiliation. Is “queer now to be taken as delineating political rather than erotic tendencies?” he asks in a rhetorical flourish that marks the book’s intervention into queer theory’s formidable mode of critique (2). In rejecting queer‘s emergent utopic ascription as a counter to normalization, Bersani argued in favor of an “anticommunal mode of connectedness” that was both intrinsic to gay desire and a potent force for enhancing, in his words, “‘the homo’ in all of us” (10).⁶

For Mikko Tuhkanen, Bersani’s critique and its reverberations engender a crucial distinction: we may be able to call Bersani “a queer thinker,” Tuhkanen says, but he “may not be a queer theorist” (8). Nevertheless, plenty of us, myself included, have given Bersani pride of place in narratives about queer theory’s origin, with his 1987 provocation “Is the Rectum a Grave?” serving as the inaugural formulation of what is now one of queer theory’s most cited and always contentious canonical traditions: the antisocial thesis. Why did we do this? Or more to the point what does it mean that Bersani’s critique of queer theory was never sufficiently resistant to his incorporation into the post-identitarian politics at stake in queer theory’s ongoing discourse about itself? These questions open a conundrum about the sociality of antisocial theorizing: for if the repudiation of sociality is to be so highly prized, why have critics so seldom attended to Bersani’s hesitation to be cast as an early progenitor, if not founding member, of queer theory’s theoretical intervention?⁷ Tuhkanen broached the matter with Bersani directly. “Are you a queer theorist?” Tuhkanen asked. “Not that I know of,” Bersani dryly responded (“Rigorously” 279).

To be sure, one can be many things without knowing or avowing it, just as a field can be built without its practitioners enthusiastically participating in the practices of competition, name-claiming, and academic kinship that accompanies its emergence. Still, what matters for my purposes arises not from the conundrum of Bersani’s “proper” place in the genealogies of queer theory or from the contradictions that reside in the unassimilable gap between theory-asmanifesto and the institutionalizing forces that structure queer academic worlds.⁸ Rather, I’m interested in tracing the resonances between Tuhkanen’s distinction between queer theory and queer thinking and critical conversations today, especially given the increasingly fallen state of theory—queer or not—in the reputational itineraries of contemporary academic and popular thought. After all, to say that Homos expressed Bersani’s disappointment with the way queer theory would emerge in academic writing to manage the impasse between politics and sexuality doesn’t say nearly enough about the generative force of the book’s early resistance to the queer theoretical enterprise or—and this is my central concern—how such resistance might be described as a definitive characteristic of queer academic work ever since. To be Bersanian about it, you could say that in today’s queer critical universe no one really wants to be a queer theorist but plenty scholars are keenly invested in the prospect of claiming allegiance to queer thinking.

In what follows, I use the distinction Tuhkanen offers between queer thinking and queer theory to generate a through line that demonstrates how, contrary to all appearances, Homos‘s rejection of queer theory in the name of homosexuality as an antisocial force is in sync with contemporary critical practices that have come to abandon the idea that homosexuality is capable of a political perversity worth fighting for. This through line lies elsewhere than in the realm of argument, as the queer theoretic is too deeply riven by political and analytic contentions arising not only from broader turns in the critical humanities and the geopolitics that shape them but also from the multiple and divergent allegiances that bind scholars to the political horizons, archival practices, and analytic critical traditions of their inter/disciplines.⁹ I locate this elsewhere in what I am calling “utopic ambivalence,” which is not an agenda or analytic but the affective disposition that animates queer thinking and its characteristic investment in countering consolidations and incorporations of various kinds, including those very gestures and institutional formations that designate queer theory as a distinct critical tradition, armed with founders, founding texts, prestige journals, signature presses, and unevenly distributed academic clout. Conceptually, utopic ambivalence draws on familiar psychoanalytic ground to designate the tension, impasse, or powerful stasis in which contradictory ideas or affects are held or experienced at the same time—in vernacular terms “mixed feelings”—and raises questions about the anxiety and discontent that arises when there is little expectation or hope for any kind of resolution, dialectical or otherwise. For queer thinking, utopic ambivalence registers its political desire for the not-yet and the yet-to-come while foregrounding its conviction that every queer agenda, destination, or sought after transformation is open to capture—and always at risk of being premature.

You can see the utopic ambivalence of queer thinking in the ongoing revisions of queer theory’s analytic and political origins, which promise to generate a past capable of inaugurating a better future even as the repetition of revision confirms the suspicion that such repair will be inadequate and incomplete, if not over time a regrettable error. You can see it in critiques of the homonationalism of activist agendas, which seek to counter popular political imaginaries that funnel queer world-building aspirations into the smaller enclaves of gay marriage, military service, and other inclusivist gestures but hesitate when it comes to defining an alternate vision of what might replace the hollowed-out institutions of an increasingly diminished popular sovereignty. And you can see it in various modes of analysis that position themselves outside or against the disciplinary protocols of the university (as in calls for feral methodology or undisciplined knowledge or queer posthumanist pedagogies), even as these rhetorical moves are forged from powerful commitments to transform the very conditions and outcomes of institutions and their disciplinary-bound worlds.¹⁰ Across these interventions, utopic ambivalence drives the insurgent potential of queer thinking to unravel and resist the practices and norms that corrupt the queer theoretic’s creative agency, propelling the field away from complicities while promising to transcend the epistemic constraints of our own historically embedded knowing. In this dynamic of desire and risk (should we call it affirmation and negation?), queer thinking offers both the promise and pleasure of wishing for while anticipating losses to come. In this, it serves as a vital source of renewal for engaging and extending queer theory’s axiomatic commitment to antinormativity.¹¹

To make my case, I want to turn first to Bersani’s Homos to explore its investment in queer thinking as a mode of anti-institutional critical practice and to highlight some of its most belligerent points about the conundrum that anti-identitarianism presents. On what grounds did Homos reject queer theory’s seeming interest, as Bersani understood it, in making queer a resonant referent for politics rather than for sexuality and the erotic? And how did this rejection produce a complicated—if not wholly contradictory—political commitment to antisociality that has become, in the interim, far more aligned within the queer theoretic with politics than with the sexual? Such a discussion acts as prelude to considering the rhetorical practices of contemporary queer commentary where queer thinking flourishes as the counter-determination and rhetorical salve for challenges not only to sexuality as the field’s much critiqued object of study but also to the wrenching conditions of the political present and the difficulties raised by attending to it.

By way of conclusion, I meditate on my contribution’s title, “Why Can’t Homosexuals Be Extraordinary?” by returning to another early critique of the queer theoretic penned by Biddy Martin, whose 1994 “Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary” challenges what she calls the “radical anti-normativity” of much early queer theory by elaborating her concern for the gender politics of its celebrated turn away from identity (123). While Bersani is not formally cited, Martin refers in the essay’s final passages to “the romantic celebration of a queerness or homo-ness as the very demise of current forms of societalization,” thereby merging what I take Homos to differentiate in order to mount her critique of the plot lines of the antisocial thesis as nothing more than a utopic dead end (123). Still, Martin’s call for homosexuality to be de-exceptionalized has become an ordinary queer theoretical gesture, even as her critique courses along different critical lines and carries no inkling (how could it?) of how quickly and often queer thinkers would come to find the extraordinary investment in queer both critically and politically suspect, as the ongoing elaboration of taxonomies of queer complicity and failures demonstrates (i.e. queer liberalism, neoliberal queer).¹² In reading utopic ambivalence as the generative force of queer thinking, my essay sets out to track the performative pleasures the field offers in a recursivity that would otherwise offend its critical sensibilities.

_______

Homos, it is important to remember, was born in a cultural environment of public dissent quite different from the one we struggle to know. The multicultural liberalism of our recent past, in which activist successes on liberalism’s traditional terrain of civil rights have been vigorously assailed as the reproductive grounds of a species of unqueer personhood that embraces, indeed celebrates, homonormative entitlements, was still to come. To be sure, Bersani prepared us to be suspicious if not wholly resistant to liberal assimilation, as his work from “Is the Rectum a Grave?” to Homos carried an unmistakable warning that the accumulation of death could engender a flight into familiar and indeed familial modes of social security as the early work of the gay marriage movement in the 1990s certainly demonstrated. But Bersani’s proto-critique of homonormativity grew from different directions, being bound to the loss of a definitional specificity in gayness that queer world-building from the outset was intent to leave behind—hence the turn from gay and lesbian to queer, and from a minoritizing mode of sexual definition, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously called it, to a tacitly universalizing one.¹³ While queer theorists were mining the intersections between AIDS activism and poststructuralist understandings of language, subjectivity, and culture, Homos was warning of a loss that would come with translating sexuality too seamlessly into the discourse and domain of politics as the primary value of critical thought. Hence his interest in posing the question, which reads then as much as it does now as a lament, about the emergent deployment of queer as a designation for “political rather than erotic tendencies” (2).

Bersani well understood the gauntlet he was throwing down, as demonstrated in the book’s arresting first line that is well worth repeating: “No one wants to be called a homosexual” (1). In offering this provocation, he concedes that under the tutelage of religious fundamentalism or a closeted gay life we can understand the designation’s rejection. Even liberal straight people, he notes, who are often “most openly sympathetic with gay causes” might not want to be “mistaken for one of those whose rights they commendably defend” (1). His concern is with “homosexual activists and theorists” whose refusal to “be” homosexual is no mere “lexical” matter but an insistence, he says, “that their chosen self-designations no longer designate the reality we might assume to be indissolubly connected to whatever term is used” (1–2). Bersani, to be clear, is not dismissive of the lessons offered by the emerging dissensus, which include the knowledge that the “stabilizing of identity is inherently a disciplinary project”; that gay identity risks being “exclusionary, delineating what is easily recognizable as a white, middle-class, liberal gay identity”; and that the very conceit of sexual preference as a homo-hetero dyad “imprisons the eroticized body within a rigidly gendered sexuality” (3, 3, 4). His point—and the framework under which the essays collected in Homos proceed—is about what must be given up in order to accede to queer theory’s axiomatic anti-identitarianism. As he puts it a paragraph later: “if these suspicions of identity are necessary, they are not necessarily liberating. Gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their sophisticated awareness of how they have been constructed as gay men and lesbians. … We have erased ourselves in the process of denaturalizing the epistemic and political regimes that have constructed us” (4).

The consequences of this erasure, for Bersani, are far-reaching. On the level of identity, they have to do much less with epistemological ideals of self-knowing than with the social world of heteronormative entitlement. “If many gays now reject a homosexual identity,” Bersani writes, “… the dominant heterosexual society doesn’t need our belief in its own naturalness in order to continue exercising and enjoying the privileges of dominance” (5). In fact, he says, efforts to “resignify” and denaturalize the authority of homosexual identity “can have assimilative rather than subversive consequences” by “eliminating the indispensable grounds for resistance to, precisely, hegemonic regimes of the normal” (5, 5, 4). He writes:

The power of those systems is only minimally contested by demonstrations of their “merely” historical character. They don’t need to be natural in order to rule; to demystify them doesn’t render them inoperative. … De-gaying gayness can only fortify homophobic oppression; it accomplishes in its own way the principal aim of homophobia: the elimination of gays. The consequence of self-erasure is … self-erasure.

(4-5; second ellipsis in source)

By rendering the queer critique of homosexual identity as a form of “de-gaying gayness,” Bersani makes clear that the stakes of his argument rest most fully on the matter of sexual desire. “[G]ay critiques of homosexual identity have been desexualizing discourses,” he insists, which leads him to introduce the “homo-ness … in gay desire” to anchor the book’s most sweeping and distinctly non-deconstructive claim: that within homo-ness one can find an “anticommunal mode of connectedness we might all share” (6, 7, 10). This mode, Bersani suggests, “could lead us to a salutary devaluing of difference—or, more exactly, to a notion of difference not as a trauma to be overcome … but rather as a nonthreatening supplement to sameness” (7).¹⁴ Bersani calls this supplement “‘the homo’ in all of us” (10).

How Bersani moves from the specificity of gay desire to “‘the homo’ in all of us” is not only one of the most confounding aspects of the book but the most challenging to the emerging queer theoretic’s critical consensus. Most confounding because in pitching the value of his text to a composite entity, “all of us,” Bersani yields to the very pressure that the book otherwise, belligerently and importantly, resists by securing a universalizing destination for the specificity of gay male desire. Most challenging because in doing so he gives to gay desire a distinctly political capacity: that “inherent in gay desire is a revolutionary inaptitude for heteroized sociality” (7). This means, Bersani writes, “sociality as we know it, and the most politically disruptive aspect of the homo-ness I will be exploring in gay desire is a redefinition of sociality so radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself” (7). Critics have long critiqued the narrow evidence on which Bersani makes these claims—how his use of Proust, Genet, and Gide provide something less than a robust archive for locating the dynamics of “gay desire”—and more than a few lesbian and lesbian feminist thinkers have proudly rejected what they take as the sheer self-absorption required to represent sexuality’s relation to patriarchal law as if Bersani’s celebration of the “gay man’s erotic joy in the penis” has revolutionary potential for “all of us” (6).

But Bersani was not deaf to these criticisms. If anything, he took them as indicative of the critical predicament that called forth his argument in the first place, which is no doubt why the book’s rarely discussed prologue proceeds under the graphic formulation of “‘We.’” Ensconced in quote marks, this “we” is both a citation in search of the security of a referent and a fugitive from referentiality altogether. In the course of the prologue’s short ten pages it is used in multiple ways: as the familiar inflation of a singular experiential “I” into a falsely plural condition, as when Bersani uses it implicitly and explicitly to mean gay white men. At other times, it gestures toward a collectivity that might exceed such specificity without resurrecting the liberalism at the heart of identity’s constitution under the auspices of difference and multicultural diversity. Bersani is well aware of the inconsistencies that ensue. “My ‘we,’” he writes on the penultimate page of the prologue, “is constantly crossing over into the territory of other ‘we’s’.” But it is precisely such mobility that can or in his words “should create a kind of community, one that can never be settled, whose membership is always shifting. It is also a community in which many straights should be able to find a place” (9; emphasis added). If the double use of “should” here betrays an anxiety about the outcome of the critical endeavor—unveiling his own critical desire for homo-ness to be politically meaningful—it also mimics the way that “queer” was being touted as a replacement for homosexual precisely because it offered a way to signal both the instability of identity and the political utility of the mobility of alliances and attachments. It is thus no small leap to say that even as Bersani resists becoming a queer theorist, he shares and even repeats queer theory’s critical desire to overcome identitarian stasis and normative inclusion. He does this by retrieving (might we call this resignifying?) homosexuality as a force of desire not identity, of relationality not personhood, in order to offer a speculative (might we call this utopic?) outcome held in check only by the uncontrollability of outcomes of any kind. “Should.”

These conundrums—I hesitate to call them contradictions—lead me into the thicket of queer thinking and utopic ambivalence that frames my interest in locating Bersani’s challenge to the queer theoretic in ways that account for more than the substance of his argumentative demurrals.¹⁵ For Bersani is not against the queer theoretic’s critical desire or the reparation it seeks in its turn away from homosexuality to exact the exceptionalism it craves for a project not just of resistant but of rebellious critical thought, one that can carry forth the drive for a world other than the one we know without being upended by acquiescence, betrayal, or the sheer burnout that comes from holding onto optimism in the face of what is. On the contrary, the queer thinking he sets into motion under the framework of gay desire is wholly in sync with the commitment to destablization and critical disorder that has always been a hallmark of queer theory, the agency of its own self-interrogation and the means by which its practitioners continue to distance themselves from its consolidations and political errors. In this regard, Homos makes clear that queer thinking is not other to the theoretic but part of its critical engine and political lifeline, serving then as now as the anti-institutional impulse that simultaneously motivates and corrects the disciplining protocols that the queer theoretic repeatedly threatens to beget.¹⁶ On the one hand, then, we have Bersani in Homos: anti-communal, anti-assimilation, anti-identitarian, antisocial. On the other, we have queer commentary ever since: antinormative, anti-institutional, anti-identitarian, antisocial, anti-antisocial and even, if you insist, anti-antinormative.

From this perspective, the utopic ambivalence that generates queer thinking is foundational, both animating the political desire of the field and the psychic and rhetorical structure of its ongoing discontent. Lest my language mislead, let me emphasize that utopic ambivalence is not isolatable as two positions that can be said to collide or divide—one affirmative and future oriented, the other stalled and riven from within. The two words forge an affective singularity, what I want to call queer theory’s formative disposition, which coagulates the promise of critical and political transgression of queer thinking with a host of field-cancelling hesitations.¹⁷ In Homos, it names the conflict-ridden meeting place between the political and critical discourses of a receding past—i.e. homosexuality; gay and lesbian studies—and the theoretical critique of identity identified, paradoxically, by queer in order to resist the emerging calculus of how and indeed whether (homo)sexuality will be the or even an object of critical value. If, in the twenty-five plus years since Homos was published, the field has been institutionalized under this nomination, it has been so by doubling down on Bersani’s resistance, not to side with his reclamation of gayness but to partake in the critical motion of the complexly affirmative force his thinking so powerfully reveals.

One can see this utopic ambivalence at work in recent discussions that mobilize queer thinking to resist not only the activist movements that align with civil rights demands to the state but also the normativities, blind spots, and political failures seen as consequences of the institutionalization of the academic project. A case in point is the 2020 special issue of Social Text, declaratively titled “Left of Queer.” Here “left” works in multiple ways, heralding a political position that refuses the liberalism of race blindness and multicultural inclusion (evoked in the introduction via the figure of Barack Obama) while also designating a frame for excavating what liberal and US-centric configurations of queer theory have left out. By situating the issue “left of the current mainstreaming and institutionalization of queer studies” and amidst the “remainders of queer theory,” the editors collate the contributions in the volume to a set of “‘third terms’, debility, indigeneity, and trans,” in order to both recall and extend “the radical potential of queer critique beyond the politics of normalization” (5, 4, 2, 5). In this formulation, “queer critique” operates as both a synonym for and mode of queer thinking, one that seeks to evade normalization and institutionalization in nearly all of its registers, leading the editors to define a new horizon for “the next iterations of queer theorizing,” what they describe as “an antinational, nonnational, and no-state queer theory oriented to the art, to borrow a concept from James C. Scott, ‘of not being governed’” (18). While this concept derives, quite famously, from Michel Foucault’s 1978 essay “What is Critique?”, the displacement of the citation performs the volume’s ambivalently held promise of securing a future for the queer theoretic that leaves perceived queer assimilations and geopolitical exceptionalisms behind.¹⁸

And yet, no matter how politically potent this genealogical invention is, the afterword to “Left of Queer” makes clear that there is a familiar loss to be suffered by what authors Eng-Beng Lim and Tavia Nyong’o tellingly refer to as the issue’s “queer program” (153). They write: “A final thought, an almost embarrassing query: what is left of sex in this latest queer program? … What does the absent presence of sex … tell us about how we think about the future queer?” (153-54).¹⁹ While the authors suggest a few figures that might return sex to the discussion without ruining the project of being to the left of queer—”genre-defying porn makers, queer sex workers, and trashy artists”—they nonetheless work hard to overcome their Bersani-like suspicions that a queer theoretical project that stakes its anti-institutional identity on a critical project of political redemption risks abandoning the messy excesses of sexuality altogether (154). “If tarrying with perversities was once a seduction with queer desire and erotic form,” they write, “how is its transmogrification into the immaculately programmatic, or in the theoretical quagmire of the leaderless Left, going to produce the kind of teachable ecstasy that we once held dear in our classrooms, subcultural spheres, and fantasy playgrounds? Or are they to be no more? We hope not” (154).

It is no surprise that Bersani goes uncited here. His work in Homos, after all, easily falls under the charge of seduction in its backward leaning interest in gay desire and erotic form, along with its archive’s circumscription, no matter his contention, of the referential yield of “we.” But even if he were cited, even if the embarrassing query could reconfigure the critical authority and political desire of the “immaculately programmatic,” even if sex could be had without first stipulating a sexually transgressive taxonomy, queer theory would still be the institutionalizing figure of ongoing error. There is no queer theoretic without the queer thinking that sets itself against it, just as there is no value to queer thinking without the utopic ambivalence that runs through it. In making this declaration, I am in no way advocating that attention to the analytic terms and critical rhetorics that structure and sustain the terrain of argument be suspended, or that the keen insights of over four decades of queer commentary as it has tried to register its own historicity be abandoned. What we contest—with the social, with one another—matters. But it is not the only thing that matters, especially not when the pleasure the field grants us comes from performing the belief that we are wholly undisciplined by it. At stake in this performance is a resistance we have yet to name: for no matter how insistent the rhetorical claim (and critical intention) to be against disciplinary practices, our interpretative practices are positively amnestic when it comes to acknowledging the pleasure unleashed by laying down the law, including those that govern what can and cannot qualify as queer, queerness, and queer resistance.

I think Biddy Martin touches on something akin to this in the essay I echo in my title, though her ultimate interests and foci do not match my own. Coupled with other writing during the same period, “Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary” takes aim at what Martin perceives as the underlying gender order of the emerging queer theoretic, with its antiidentitarianism seeming to reference—and reject—lesbian and feminist identifications as well as practices of everyday life that involve the unsexy and heavily gendered domestic sphere.²⁰ For Martin, ordinary worlds are ones occupied (at least in large part) by women while prevailing constructions of queerness are held in thrall to “the lure of an existence without limit, without bodies or psyches, and certainly without mothers” (123). Her polemic was not an unfamiliar one at the time, and would be countered four years later by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, who took themselves as targets of her critique. “We think our friend Biddy might be referring to us,” they write before unfurling their powerful rebuttal (“Sex in Public,” 557).²¹ But Berlant and Warner had not published together when Martin’s essay appeared in 1994; their “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” came out in 1995, followed by “Sex in Public” in 1998.²² One doesn’t have to look very hard to see that the unnamed culprit behind Martin’s invective against “the romantic celebration of queerness or homo-ness” is Bersani’s “The Gay Outlaw,” which appeared, as I’ve noted, as the lead piece in the special issue of Diacritics Martin edited with Butler (123). Bersani, whose Diacritics essay introduces readers to the arguments of Homos and forges from Jean Genet’s writing about rimming and anal intercourse the opening salvo of his polemic in favor of “the antirelationality inherent in all homoness” (“The Gay Outlaw,” 10). The irony of course is that the extraordinary homosexual Martin saw in the deft and furious analysis of “The Gay Outlaw” was for Bersani as much a scene of loss as of celebration and subversion, as his deliberation on the political and deconstructive allegiances of queer theory at the outset of Homos would make perfectly clear.

I’m not suggesting that Martin and Bersani were in the end anything like comrades in the antagonisms that erupted as queer theory took on the identity politics of gay and lesbian studies and committed itself to the anti-Enlightenment hermeneutics of poststructuralism. On the contrary, the threat they each sought to register came from different directions, with Bersani’s turn to homo-ness as a reclamation of gay desire serving as an affront to Martin’s investments in the ordinariness of everyday lesbian worlds. Still, I can’t help think, all these years later, that the disjunction between them—Bersani, with his lament that no one wants to be a homosexual and Martin, with her irritation at extraordinary homosexuals—would come to an unlikely convergence as the figure of the homosexual, no less than sexuality itself, lost epistemological ground in the burgeoning archive that we now call queer theory. We could say in fact that Martin got what she wished for—the debunking of the fantasy of extraordinary homosexuals—even if we now know that the “radical anti-normativity” she decried did not need extraordinary homosexuals (or extraordinary queers for that matter) to do its taxonomic and ambivalent utopic work. As to Bersani, his attempt in Homos to hold on to desire while finding a way for gayness to persist in the impersonality of anticommunal and antisocial relations did deliver the tantalizing promise to redeem politics—until it didn’t.

From the perspective of these ruminations, what appears most salient to me in the long durée of queer theory is the endurance of its insistence, no matter the losses it has suffered, on pursuing the political promises that compel it. That those promises are ambivalently held is one of my main points, which is why I think the pleasure the field offers in the utopic ambivalence that drives queer thinking is one it can’t let go. Is this situation and the recursivity that enables it to be lamented or applauded? Indulged, disciplined, or merely observed? These choices are already overdetermined by the relationship between loss and pleasure that I have been tracking, where losing what one desires—a queer queerness, a queer theory that doesn’t betray its queerness—is now foundational to making one’s way back to finding it again. If all this feels, at times, a bit exhausting, it’s possible, as I’ve discovered in writing this essay, to take pleasure in that too.

Robyn Wiegman is Professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University and author of Object Lessons (2012), American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), and numerous anthologies that focus on the institutional and political formation of identity knowledges. Her editorial work includes special issues on “Autotheory,” “Queer Theory Without Antinormativity” and “Sexual Politics, Sexual Panics,” which won the best special issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2019. She is the former director of Women’s Studies at both Duke and UC Irvine.

Notes

My thanks to the editors of this issue for comments on early drafts and to Austin Svedjan, in particular, for organizing the 2022 MLA panel on “Homos at 25,” which served as the initial prompt for my re-engagement with Bersani’s book. I also thank Julien Fischer, Zahid Chaudhary, and Jennifer Nash for their insightful comments on my argument and its rhetorical and organizational execution.

1. “The Gay Outlaw” is the lead essay in the special issue, titled “Critical Crossings,” Butler and Martin organized around the concept of “Cross-Identifications” in order to expand the journal’s official invitation to focus the issue on gay and lesbian studies. Queer theory, they write in their brief introduction, “has promised to complicate assumptions about routes of identification and desire. We wanted to test that promise by soliciting essays that analyze critical, even surprising, boundary crossings,” especially “work that interrogates the problem of cross-identification within and across race and postcolonial studies, gender theory, and theories of sexuality” (3). The issue includes essays by Diana Fuss, Valerie Smith, Harryette Mullen, Phillip Brian Harper, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Parveen Adams, and Carolyn Dinshaw, among others.

2. Robert A. Caserio hones in on this sentence in the opening foray of his introduction to the PMLA forum on the antisocial thesis in 2006, which we might designate retrospectively as the canonizing moment for both the antisocial thesis and Bersani’s leading contribution to it. Notably Bersani is not a participant in the debate. Tim Dean, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz sketch what will become the thesis’s signature contentions, with the latter’s contribution, “Thinking Beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer Critique,” serving now as the inaugural queer of color intervention into antisocial theorizing. Muñoz develops his critique of the antirelational (more so than antisocial) in Cruising Utopia by rejecting the ontological implications of Lacanian theory in favor of an emphasis on everyday life, ethical aesthetics, and intimate public spheres through an allegiance to the Marxian-Freudian tradition of the Frankfurt School, specifically Ernst Bloch. For a somewhat counterintuitive engagement with Cruising Utopia, see Marasco, who uses Muñoz’s method of hope to develop a “method of despair” to assemble Georges Bataille’s archive of antifascist thought (5).

3. In Sex, Or the Unbearable, Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman seek to “reformulate … the antisocial thesis” in ways that take the psychic dissolution of the self as preamble to the constitution of nonsovereignty as a political and ethical necessity (xiii). While they admit that the book lacks the sex of its title, their conversation explores the complexity of negativity and self-decomposition as an encounter with and not against the social itself. See my long form review of the book, which touches on a variety of issues at stake in this special issue (Wiegman, “Sex”).

4. Let me emphasize the importance of the qualifier “named” in this sentence as there are now multiple genealogies for queer theory or its doppelganger queer studies, not all of which hew to the high notes of the poststructuralist influence on critical theory that swept the humanities in the US university in the 1980s. It is nonetheless that genealogy, usefully delineated by Annamarie Jagose in her wide-ranging introduction to the field in 1997, that concerns Bersani in his introduction to Homos. For a provocative argument that the poststructuralist queer project has run its course by revealing its absolute incompatibility with emancipatory politics, see Penny. For genealogies that turn toward queer criticism’s entanglements with feminism writ large and with women of color feminism in particular, see Holland; Hong and Ferguson; and Huffer. And for a compellingly comprehensive review of the multiple trajectories and unsettled origin of queer theory, see Amin.

5. For early reviews of the book, see Patrick Paul Garlinger, who derides Homos for its “fear of femininity” and its ultimate inability to differentiate between a theory of gender and one of sexual difference (56); and David Halperin, who calls it an “elegant and infuriating new book”—elegant because of the force of its writing, infuriating because it not only collapses “the distinction between sexual and political powerplays,” but employs such a “passion for disidentification” that its author must “distinguish himself from a crowd of thinkers who hold ideological positions identical to his own … by means of an argument which most would totally reject.” See also Kopelson; and Knadler.

6. In his review of Homos, Halperin aptly describes the book as an attempt to “depoliticize homosexuality (at least provisionally), to return it to its specificity as a sexual practice, to treat it not as either central or marginal but rather as a crime against civilisation, an attack on the foundations of social life as we know it, a challenge to the very possibility of human ‘relationality’ or community. Only if it is understood in such an uncompromising fashion can homosexuality once again become politically productive.” The recursivity that queer thinking enables is strikingly apparent here, as the very purpose of detaching homosexuality from politics is the necessary predicate for politicizing homosexuality. Only by severing the tie (to homosexuality, to identity, to the demand for a political instrumentality) can the queer theoretic’s political commitment be renewed.

7. While my inquiry is organized predominantly around Bersani, I am hopeful that other contributions to this special issue will attend to “the sociality of antisocial theorizing” by taking on the now calcified opposition between the antisocial and the anti-antisocial (also called the relational and collective). This calcification largely pits Edelman’s distinctly Lacanian reading of queerness in No Future against Muñoz’s reclamation of futurity in Cruising Utopia through a binary inscription of race that ascribes negativity, self-shattering, and the symbolic reign of the Child to an untheorized whiteness, and the communal, utopic, and social to minoritized subjects. Such an opposition has too often occluded the ways in which negativity is central to Muñoz’s thought, as Mari Ruti has discussed in her commitment to moving “Beyond the Antisocial-Social Divide” (130). But while Ruti insists on the universality of negativity for queer critique, she concludes that “much of the blame for the rancor must be placed on Edelman’s side” given that “the kind of radical self-dissolution that [he] celebrates can only be undertaken from a position of relative security … [as] those who lead economically precarious lives (that is, subjects whose claim to symbolic identity is shaky to begin with)—simply cannot afford to abandon themselves to the jouissance of the death drive” (125). In this, Ruti comes close to defining the relationship to the death drive in volitional terms, which simultaneously ignores the specificity of the drive in psychoanalytic thought and mutes the conceptual incommensurabilities between Edelman and Muñoz’s work. For my take on this, see Wiegman, “Sex,” as well as related conversations about negativity and antisociality in Bliss; Tim Dean; Marriott; and Weiner and Young.

8. This is not a stab against institutionalization, which I have never been against in that now-canonical way that figures it as the usurper of queer critique’s radicality, as if the priority we give to the political requires the fantasy that we are always outside that which we critique, not bound up in it or even, if antagonistically, bound to it. More to the point, if institutions have betrayed us, it is surely the case that we have also needed them to fail as prerequisite to the promise of our political and critical exceptionality. These matters are very much entwined with the difficult impasse of a cultural present in which no progressive achievement is surviving the rise of theocratic authoritarianism in the breach created by liberalism’s spectacular historical demise, one we’ve wished for but with a far different result in mind. For a discussion of how the anti-disciplinarity in Gender Studies is a form of cruel optimism we seem to need, see Wiegman, “Loss.”

9. A full itinerary of these arguments would be incomplete and no doubt contentious in itself. But as I see it, the demise of poststructuralism’s explanatory power and political purchase has fractured whatever security it held as referent and synonym for “theory” in the last decades of the twentieth century, giving rise to a number of theoretical turns—affect, new materialisms, the posthuman alongside issues of governmentality, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism—that parse the social, historical, and subjective in ways that revise and extend more so than cancel some of poststructuralism’s primary concerns, albeit in ways that displace the centrality of the discursive.

10. To be clear: no one—certainly not this writer or this special issue—escapes implication here, no matter how much rhetorical work might be spent on idealizing, in the name of queer thinking, one’s otherness to the field’s own formation of institutional power.

11. If it seems that I am poking the bear here by raising the specter of what Austin Svedjan calls retrospectively the “Normativity Wars,” my point is not to resuscitate an earlier attempt to consider the distinctly disciplinary force of the field’s axiomatic commitment to antinormativity (1). That attempt was pretty much kicked to the curb at the outset through passionate defenses of antinormativity as the means by which queer theory differentiates its analytic and political force from oppressive regimes of various kinds, including those that arise from the exclusive commitments of a virulent homophobic world (see Wiegman and Wilson; Halberstam; Duggan). But nearly a decade on and in the midst of the far right’s own antinormativity project, it is perhaps possible to wonder if normativity as antagonist can outlive the demise of liberalism and the institutions and subject formations it has generated. I say this not simply because of the way in which normativity is historically wed to the economic and political culture that liberalism has sustained but also because of the felt urgency of our now, which increasingly finds liberalism in ruins not from left progressive or socialist successes but from the expansive rise of white Christo-nationalist illiberalism and its authoritarian compact with zombie capitalism. In no way does this dismiss the utter failure of liberal institutions to serve as anything more than a structural alibi for the “softer” forms of violence—what Chandan Reddy calls “freedom with violence.” My point is simply that at a time when the genres of liberal affect—what Lauren Berlant aptly named cruel optimism—are being outpaced by a widespread and politically diverse apocalyptic imaginary of world endings, the axiomatic antinormativity of queer commentary, in both the domain of theory and the queer thinking that renews and reconfigures it, seems increasingly out of sorts as a framework for understanding the neo of neoliberalism. On this final point, see especially Brown (Ruins; Undoing); Cherniavsky; Jodi Dean; and McClanahan.

12. It is of course the case that in defining the ways in which queerness, queers, and/or queer theory have become incorporated into or complacent with either historical structures of oppression (settler colonialist, white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist, etc.) or theoretical traditions scarred by their own blind spots or misbegotten allegiances (liberalism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, etc.), there remains a deep investment in the potential radicality of queer nonetheless. Gila Ashtor’s recent book, Homo Psyche, is interesting in this regard as its critique of the displacement of sexuality in queer work—what Ashtor calls erotophobia—holds forth a promise of fulfilling the erotophilic inventions of queer theory. Methodologically, she writes, the book “provides queer theory with an evaluative process that has been elusive in preceding critical endeavors: a technique for marking precisely where, in political-ethical arguments that promise an extreme repudiation of oppressive ideological norms, the uncritical dependence on normative psychological assumptions perpetuates erotophobic formulations that misrecognize the complexity of queer erotic lives and thereby prevent queer critique from elaborating a subversion of sexuality’s status quo” (9).

13. In Epistemology of the Closet Sedgwick uses this language to describe the operations of the homo/heterosexual distinction. On the one hand, she writes, the distinction is “of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority (what I refer to as a minoritizing view)” while on the other hand, it is “of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a universalizing view)” (1). Homophobia, Sedgwick argues, insinuates itself into both approaches, which allows it to move at times effortlessly as an attack on sexual minorities and as a mode of universal sexual regulation.

14. In his 2014 conversation with Tuhkanen, Bersani inserted a critique of his approach to sameness in Homos while responding to a question about his relation to the antisocial thesis and the role attributed to him:

Apparently I’m put in the same category as Lee Edelman; to some queer theorists we’re the bad guys because we’re presumably “antisocial.” Well, I suppose he is more uncompromising about “negativity” than I am. Already in Homos I was trying to think of connectedness, that is, trying to adapt the idea of “correspondences of form” to psychic correspondences; I was thinking of homosexuality as a kind of psychic correspondence of sameness. This now strikes me as taking the sameness in same-sex desire too literally … sameness is obviously not the only thing between gay people, and there’s more difference very often between two gay people than there is between a gay person and a straight person. So the argument in Homos strikes me as a somewhat unfortunate application of the idea of correspondences and connectedness. But to the extent that I was, and have always been, interested in the Foucauldian idea of “new relational modes,” it seemed to me that the precondition for such modes has to be a kind of antisocial breaking-down of relations.

(Bersani, “Rigorously” 280)

15. The demand for non-contradictory writing is always a demand not simply to be fully self-knowing, but for language to be a perfect match for that knowing. It’s a harsh and farcical expectation for any writer to bear, which might be why the writer-as-critic rarely demurs from the pleasure of accusation when the text in question is not their own.

16. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner also argued in 1995—the same year that Homos appeared—against the consolidation of what they called “queer commentary” into a seemingly knowable entity, which was their way of trying to maintain the queerness of queer critical practices in the decade of the emergence of a distinct field of study called queer theory (343). Of course, their anti-institutional warrant appeared in the pages of PMLA, an irony of sorts that has now been repeated multiple times in special issues, guest columns, and book projects that have sought to pre- and post-date the queer theoretic with modes of queer thinking that can outrun its sedimentations into a “theory,” “tradition,” or “identity.”

17. Queer commentary’s response to the decriminalization of sodomy in Lawrence v Texas is a case in point, as the seeming civil rights success was met with much disdain that homosexuality was being domesticated and homosexuals divided by heightened governmental regulation of sexuality. See for instance Franke; Hunter; and Ruskola.

18. Displacement is also a mode of fetishization, which is always the risk that attends critiques of US exceptionalism that figure the geopolitical “elsewhere” as the fantastical ground of the American Americanist’s post-imperial thinking. In this case, the use of Scott’s 2009 book (erroneously listed in the bibliography as 2004) invents a genealogy for the field that displaces the European focus of The History of Sexuality, offering instead a project whose subtitle, The Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, points to the book’s elaboration of a region that is not incorporated into any nation state. Anarchism is thus heralded as queer theory’s proper political future in a critical move that paradoxically produces the figure of the “ungovernable” as a critical demand. Notably, in the cited text, Scott also offers no nod to Foucault in describing the origins of the book’s title. While the matter of citational ownership is always a vexed one, the absence of reference to the Foucauldian resonance of “the art of not being governed” seems quite crucial to the political project of moving “left of queer.”

19. Lim and Nyong’o offer an interesting footnote that opens the door for reengaging the queer of color critique of the antisocial thesis by highlighting the importance of the issue’s turn to new materialisms and objectless critique. They write:

The engagement of this issue with object-oriented materialisms, old and new, inspires us to revisit briefly a polemic otherwise (somewhat gratefully) absent from these pages. We refer to the so-called antirelational thesis in queer theory, especially insofar as it inspired a particularly trenchant response from queer of color critique. In some ways, the invitation that objectless critique provides to move away from life/death binarisms and instead to move toward the new animacies given to us by life/nonlife geontologies might also provide avenues for revisiting what was at stake in the fierce resistance of many queer critics of color to embracing the death drive or social death as paradigmatic of minoritarian existence. (emphasis added)

(152)

The specification of the “or” here points toward an increasingly vast archive in Black studies that considers the ways in which the ontology of antiblackness functions as the condition of the social and its coveted invention, the human. See especially Sexton; Warren; and Wilderson.

20. See also Martin, “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias,” first published in the special issue of Diacritics in which “The Gay Outlaw” appeared.

21. “To be against normalization,” Berlant and Warner insist, “is not to be afraid of ordinariness. Nor is it to advocate the ‘existence without limit’ [Martin] sees as produced by bad Foucauldians. Nor is it to decide that sentimental identifications with family and children are waste or garbage, or make people into waste or garbage. … What we have been arguing here is that the space of sexual culture has become obnoxiously cramped from the work of maintaining a normal metaculture” (557). If Martin ever responded to Berlant and Warner, it wasn’t in print, but I’m sure she noticed that “Sex in Public” underscored one of her main points by making erotic vomiting its most enduring sex scene.

22. In addition to the problem of publication dates, there aren’t actually any extraordinary homosexuals in “Sex in Public.” Even the riveting scene of a performance of erotic vomiting in a leather bar reveals its queer nature: “Word has gone around that the boy is straight,” Berlant and Warner write. “We want to know: What does that mean in this context?” (565).

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• Marriott, David. “No Second Chances.” Queer Times, Queer Becomings, edited by E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, SUNY P, 2011, pp. 101-19.
• Martin, Biddy. “Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary.” Differences, vol. 6, nos. 2-3, 1994, pp. 100-25.
• –––. “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias.” Critical Crossings, special issue of Diacritics, edited by Judith Butler and Biddy Martin, 1994, pp. 104-21.
• McClanahan, Annie. “Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject.” Boundary 2, vol. 46, no.1, 2019, pp. 103-32.
• Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York UP, 2009.
• –––. “Thinking Beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer Critique.” The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory, forum in PMLA, edited by Robert L. Caserio, vol. 121, no. 3, 2006, pp. 825-26.
• Penny, James. After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics. Pluto Press, 2014.
• Reddy, Chandan. Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State. Duke UP, 2011.
• Ruskola, Teemu. “Gay Rights Versus Queer Theory: What is Left of Sodomy after Lawrence V. Texas?” Social Text, vol. 23, nos. 3-4, 2005, pp. 84-85.
• Ruti, Mari. The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. Columbia UP, 2017.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Columbia UP, 1990.
• Sexton, Jared. “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts.” Lateral: A Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, vol. 1, 2012, https://csalateral.org/issue/1/ante-anti-blackness-afterthoughts-sexton/.
• Svedjan, Austin. “Introduction: Post-Normative?” South Atlantic Review, vol. 87, no. 3, 2022, pp. 1-9.
• Tuhkanen, Mikko. Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction. Bloomsbury, 2020.
• Warren, Calvin. “Black Interiority, Freedom, and the Impossibility of Living.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 38, no.2, 2016, pp. 107-21.
• Weiner, Joshua J., and Damon Young. “Introduction: Queer Bonds.” Queer Bonds, special issue of GLQ, edited by Damon Young and Joshua J. Weiner, vol. 17, nos. 2–3, 2011, pp. 223-41.
• Wiegman, Robyn. “Loss, Hope: The University in Ruins, Again.” Feminist Studies, vol. 48, no.3, 2022, pp. 616-37.
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• Wilderson, Frank B., III. “Social Death and Narrative Aporia in 12 Years a Slave.” Black Camera, vol. 7, no. 1, Fall, 2015, pp. 134-49.

Bobby Benedicto (bio)

In 1996, the minnesota review published one of the most scathing responses to Homos in Stephen Knadler’s damningly titled “Leo Bersani and the Nostalgia for White Male Radicalism.” Taking issue with the book’s claim that a radical ethics might be derived from a model of relationality that devalorizes difference in favor of a “desire to repeat, to expand, to intensify the same” of one’s self (Homos 149), Knadler argues that Bersani offers no “real social vision” (174) and that beneath his investment in sameness or “homo-ness” lies a retrograde longing for the return of a “racially hygienic radicalism” (170) in which white gay men might find themselves free from “empathetic identification with women and minorities” (174). While Bersani understands the logic of difference as inseparable from the paranoid egoic defenses that, for him, serve as the psychic foundation for violence writ large, Knadler sees the call to unseat difference and embrace self-negating homo-relations as a defensive gesture in and of itself, an attempt to push back against an emerging “world where white men, forced to recognize the self-authorized identities of African Americans, Asians, and Latinos, can no longer displace their own selves onto the other with impunity” (174–75). Built on “dreams of a community where relations are no longer held hostage … to the demands for an intimate knowledge of the other,” the true aim of Bersani’s “revolutionary re-organization” of the social, Knadler argues, is “to snuff out multiculturalism in gay jouissance” (170, 174).

While Knadler’s review at times crosses into hyperbole (he says, for instance, that we “should not fail to detect the white supremacism beneath [Bersani’s] liberationist rhetoric” [174]), the general line of criticism he lays out has proved enduring. Its echoes can be heard most clearly in José Esteban Muñoz’s contribution to the 2005 MLA forum on the “antisocial thesis” in queer theory, where he famously describes “antirelational approaches” as “the gay white man’s last stand”: “romances of negativity” animated by a desire to distance queerness from “contamination by race, gender, or other particularities,” modes of “wishful thinking, invest(ed) in deferring various dreams of difference” (“Thinking” 825). Like Knadler before him, Muñoz sees the embrace of negativity as the expression of a privileged positionality covertly elevated to universal status, a view he would go on to elaborate in Cruising Utopia, where he charges Lee Edelman’s No Future with deploying a “white gay male crypto-identity politics” that restages “whiteness as a universal norm via the imaginary negation of all other identities that position themselves as not white” (95). Unlike Knadler’s review, however, which portrays Bersani as the lone holdout from a bygone era of gay studies, Muñoz’s critique casts Bersani and Edelman together as representatives of a “turn in queer criticism,” a dominant albeit “faltering” paradigm, the insights of which had grown “routine and resoundingly uncritical,” having been “stunted” by an infatuation with negativity and an overinvestment in “scenes of jouissance, which are always described as shattering orgasmic ruptures often associated with gay male sexual abandon or self-styled risky behavior” (“Thinking” 826; Cruising 14). Muñoz’s critique, in other words, not only extends a set of objections from Bersani to Edelman; it also renders those objections in intellectual historical terms, and, in so doing, introduces into queer studies a narrative frame that would relegate negativity, particularly as articulated by (Freudo-Lacanian) psychoanalysis, to the field’s “white gay male” past and that would stake its future, in turn, on the corrective of a “reparative hermeneutics,” an “anti-antiutopianism” exemplified, most notably, by the work of scholars addressing “the particularities of queers of color and their politics” (“Thinking” 826).¹

This narrative has since been woven into the field’s common sense and has paved the way for the now axiomatic rejection of the negativity associated with the “antirelational turn” on the grounds of a double-sided claim: that theories of self-negation require a white gay male subject, or, more broadly, a position of privilege; and that the interest of those who do not share in that privilege lies in reparative approaches.² The investment in the latter is reflected in the emergence of a recognizable interpretative frame, through which queer cultural or aesthetic practices are read as generative of alternative or ameliorative forms of intimacy, kinship, care, selfhood, sociality, relationality, and so on, and extolled, in turn, as nods towards queer futures or worlds, or as evidence of a certain capacity to imagine things “otherwise.”³ While there are important differences among the works that address such terms, the frame itself speaks to the broad consensus that has formed around Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call to counter the hypervigilant, “paranoid” structure of critique or the hermeneutics of suspicion with a reparative reading practice that instead centers “the many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (“Paranoid” 35).⁴ In queer of color critique, the reparative consensus seems especially clear, as much of the literature that comprises the field now appears to reflect a shared commitment to illuminating the productive dimensions of queer existence, or to reading for practices that allow queer subjects to “reclaim and remake selfhood” (Musser, Sensual 12), “access social recognition and intelligibility” (Nguyen 205), “protect some form of autonomy in their day-to-day experience” (moore 18), or “[create] meaning and pleasure anew from the recycled scraps of dominant cultures” (Rodríguez 136).⁵

Reparative reading has been so fully embraced that one could argue that it has become precisely what the paranoid mode once was or is said to have been: “nearly automatic in queer studies,” even a “prescriptive article of faith” (Muñoz, “Thinking” 826; Sedgwick, “Introduction” 277). Indeed, Sedgwick’s critique of paranoid reading as an overly anticipatory practice that forecloses “surprises” appears to have engendered a kind of paranoia about paranoia itself, an aversion to critique that authorizes only the repeated rediscovery of what might be the least surprising of discoveries: namely, that people find ways to deal, to endure, to “extract sustenance” and even pleasure from the objects of culture and conditions they are given (Benedicto, “On Writing”).⁶ While it may be true, in other words, that the hermeneutics of suspicion anticipates objects in advance and hence “always finds the mirages and failures for which it looks” (Berlant 123), the reparative impulse has proven to be just as anticipatory: it also always finds the ameliorative practices on which it pins its hopes (Benedicto, “On Writing”). The reparative impulse always finds such practices, however, because it insulates the reader’s cherished objects and attachments from suspicion; it brackets from the outset those modes of critique that would only threaten to undo the subject’s attempt to carve out a place for itself, to “assemble … something like a whole” (Sedgwick, “Paranoid” 8).

Not all works that adopt the paranoid position are, for this reason, refused in the name of repair. Works that might be described as forms of ideological and institutional critique, in particular, are generally amenable to reparative projects, as they employ a hermeneutics of suspicion that is directed only outwards and that is thus able to supply the kind of oppositional coordinates needed for any notion of self or world to cohere. The writings of Bersani and Edelman, however, are in essence irreconcilable with reparative aims, for not only do they fail to contribute to the “additive and accretive” processes of self- and world-making (Sedgwick, “Paranoid” 27), they insist on the critical importance of that which must be subtracted in order for such processes to proceed: the resistance to assemblage that inheres within the subject itself, the negativity that psychoanalysis locates specifically in “sexuality.”⁷ I will say more about the account of sexuality that underwrites the antisocial thesis, and Bersani’s work especially, in the section that follows. Suffice it to say for now that the emphasis the antisocial thesis places on sexuality cannot be seen as the mere privileging of one axis of difference over others, nor as the reflection of a disinterest in difference per se, for what that emphasis represents is an insistence on the “phenomenon of the subject’s displacement, its failure to coincide with itself,” that is, its difference from itself (Copjec, “Sexual” 204). In other words, the antisocial thesis, like psychoanalysis more broadly, attends to the difference effaced by “dreams of difference” based on social categories; it draws our attention to the “intimate relation that links the subject indissolubly to its own otherness” (200), the alienation that resides in the subject’s division and that cannot be represented as “difference” within the symbolic field.

Thus, while it is often said that critics such as Bersani and Edelman embrace negativity in order to erase the subject, it would be more accurate to say that they maintain negativity because the resistance to being rendered “whole,” to coincidence with signifiers of difference, is where psychoanalysis locates subjectivity as such. The idea that something of the subject itself is lost when negativity is ceded is overlooked in the prevailing critique of the antisocial thesis, where the affirmation of negativity is said to involve “an escape via singularity … whose price most cannot afford” (Muñoz, Cruising 96), or a relinquishing of mastery that others do not possess (Musser, Sensational 15). Echoing Muñoz, for instance, Mari Ruti argues that “radical self-dissolution … can only be undertaken from a position of relative security … [D]eprivileged subjects—many women, racialized subjects, and those who lead economically precarious lives … simply cannot afford to abandon themselves to the jouissance of the death drive in the way that more secure subjects might be tempted (or even compelled) to do” (125). Arguing against what she sees as Edelman’s overly negative reading of Lacan, Ruti punctuates her critique with a retort that harks back to Knadler’s review of Homos: Not everyone, she writes, “wishes to snuff out the subject in a frenzy of suicidal jouissance” (42). In this essay, I want to challenge this familiar refrain by offering a close re-reading of Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” since it is in certain responses to this essay that one finds symptomatic misreadings of self-negation or self-shattering as an agential practice of transgression. The horrific context in which Bersani’s essay was written already complicates the claim that an ethics of self-negation requires a model of subjectivity removed from conditions of precarity and vulnerability. Far from insulated from such conditions, the essay in fact draws out a relationship between the violence of social negation and the ontological negativity that sexuality’s aberrant nature registers for all, and, in view of that relationship, issues a prescient warning against turning away from self-loss in the name of repair. In reading Bersani this way, however, I do not mean to suggest that he is able to account for questions of race and racial difference.⁸ Bersani’s failure to address such questions is rather the starting point for a closer examination of what ontological negativity means for the racialized subject. Using the figure of castration to rethink the relationship between ontological negativity and social negation as well as the tension between queer of color critique and psychoanalysis, I argue that in order to address the violence that accrues under the sign of “race” it is necessary that we retain—against the reparative imperative to seek “something like a whole”—an account of negativity as the lack of being that is both universal and irreparable.

II

In Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, Amber Musser offers the following restatement of the familiar critique of the antisocial thesis described above. Referring specifically to Bersani’s account of self-shattering, she writes:

By now, the description of jouissance during sex that Leo Bersani proffers in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” is ubiquitous. Bersani uses it to articulate the pleasures of anal sex at the height of the AIDS emergency, when sex between men was imagined as a death sentence. He uses jouissance to undermine the homophobic imaginary of “the intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.” … Bersani’s essay has been much analyzed, so I will not dwell on its many complexities here, but I am interested in complicating this idea of penetration as self-shattering. As others, including myself, have argued, Bersani is writing from the position where one has a self to shatter, which is to say a position of already inhabiting sovereign subjectivity. This is phallic jouissance.

(72–73)

I quote this passage at length because it opens with a fact and ends with a claim that together raise some immediate questions for me: Can gay men “at the height of the AIDS emergency” be described as inhabiting a position of “sovereign subjectivity”? If not, if one accepts that gay men in toto were vulnerable, even abject and disposable at the time, then what is at stake in describing a critic such as Bersani, writing in the shadow of a “death sentence,” as nonetheless having a “self to shatter?” What calculus, what accounts of “sovereignty” and vulnerability, enable us to cast the self-shattering subject as a representative of the former and not the latter, and what do those accounts keep us from seeing in Bersani’s “much analyzed” essay, chief among the “many complexities” of which surely must be its having been written in the face of genocidal neglect, of a thinly veiled “murderous judgment” (Is the Rectum 30)? I raise these questions, somewhat pointedly I admit, only to draw attention to the routine way that critics, when claiming that theories of self-shattering, of a negativity intrinsic to all subjects, do not speak to conditions of genuine precarity, seem to forget the context in which its most famous formulation was crafted, or only recall the context in purely perfunctory fashion. Indeed, in some cases, the context of HIV/AIDS goes entirely unacknowledged, which then sets the stage for some strongly-worded versions of this complaint, as when Ruti argues, for instance, that “models of self-undoing … are characterized by the heroism of a subject who is able to endure its own death (a bit like Jesus),” or posits that those who are “drawn to theories of self-dissolution” are those “whose symbolic investments protect them from the more shattering frequencies of life” (186, 126).

Such comments are particularly striking when one considers how the very forcefulness of “Is the Rectum a Grave?” derives from the audacity of the position Bersani takes. As David Kurnick points out, the excitement of the essay comes precisely from seeing Bersani hold to an ethics of self-loss even while facing the “apocalyptic historical surround” of the AIDS crisis, his unwillingness to forgo “the risk of the sexual” despite the unendurable consequences to which it would become linked (110, 109). In other words, the strength of the essay lies in how it turns to self-shattering in response to the “shattering frequencies of life,” in its rejection of the intuitive claim, now waved against it, that conditions of social negation entail the renunciation of negativity. Read without subtracting the horrors to which it responds, Bersani’s essay thus raises some difficult questions. It asks us to consider what it might mean, for instance, to affirm negativity from the position of those who are socially negated, if not those already marked for death, or to embrace self-shattering as the proper ethical response to having one’s world shattered. The answers to such questions may change depending on the form and nature of the negation with which one is concerned.⁹ One need not entertain them at all, however, if one instead holds on to the image of the self-shattering subject as a subject insulated from danger and risk, a “sovereign” figure able to “endure” even “its own death.”

Holding on to this image, it becomes possible to claim, as Musser does, that self-shattering represents a practice of “exceptionalism” in which a self-possessed, agential subject attempts to “relinquish his mastery” or find a “way outside of subjectivity” (Sensational 15, 14). To understand self-shattering this way, however, is not only to bracket the context of HIV/AIDS but also to miss the critical turn that the essay’s argument takes when Bersani recasts the threat of self-loss that the epidemic ties directly to sex as but a tragic literalization of the “risk of the sexual itself,” that is, of the lack of self-possession already built into or operative in the subject as sexuality (Is the Rectum 30). This lack is reflected in the exceedingly careful way Bersani avoids presenting self-shattering in agential terms. Take, for instance, the famous passage Musser quotes, in which Bersani describes the image that most readers now associate with his theory of self-shattering: “the intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (emphasis added). This image offers no expression of agency, not even in the paradoxical form of an agential renunciation of agency. In fact, it depicts the very opposite: a scene of inability, where the subject appears not as acting in accordance with its own desires, and certainly not out of any interest in transgression or subversion, but as acted upon, compelled by a force that appears to come from without and within and that only seeks to attain and repeat an enjoyment that the subject does not want and that would expropriate it from itself (Benedicto, “Failure”). In other words, if there is an agency involved in self-shattering, it is not the sovereign subject but the drive or death drive, the very insistence of which serves to confirm what the discovery of the unconscious already reveals: that the ego is not “master in its own house” (Freud, “Introductory” 285), or that the subject is constitutively nonsovereign. Contrary to Musser’s claim, Bersani does not conceive of self-shattering as a “way outside of subjectivity” or a “relinquishing of mastery,” for his inquiry proceeds from the psychoanalytic proposition that sexuality pertains to “the being-there of the unconscious” and hence entails an encounter with the subject’s condition as a “body in fragments,” or with the irreparable out-of-joint-ness that registers the impossibility of mastery as such (Zupančič 12).

This dimension of Bersani’s argument is easy to overlook, not least because of the attention “Is the Rectum a Grave?” pays to “the jouissance of exploded limits … the ecstatic suffering into which the human organism momentarily plunges when it is ‘pressed’ beyond a certain threshold of endurance” (24). Read only in these orgasmic terms, jouissance might seem like the point to which Bersani had been building up, the achievement that he would celebrate and that gives critics reason to claim that self-shattering assumes a heroic agent of some form, a prior unity to shatter. Bersani, however, also argues that there is no self prior to shattering, that even the ego itself is but a “passionate inference” derived from the repetition of unbinding experiences against which it emerges as a defense (Culture 38). What is at stake in Bersani’s thought, and in psychoanalysis more broadly, is thus not “the one of [a] unity shattered by the traumatic, but … the one constituted by shattering,” a one that also always remains “not-one” precisely because there appears to be an absent cause, a negativity, that drives its enjoyment (Copjec, “Sexual” 200). In other words, what the sexual shatters is not a subject that is or was ever whole, but the “fiction of an inviolable and unified subject” (Bersani, Is the Rectum 43), the fantasy of sovereignty that is inscribed within the claim that there is a subject who “already inhabits a position of sovereign subjectivity,” a “One” who has what one does not: a self to shatter.

For Bersani, sexuality challenges this fantasy not simply because sex holds out the prospect of arriving at a “jouissance in which the subject is momentarily undone” (Homos 100), but because it marks the presence of “something radically inoperative in human thought”; it delineates “a nonhermeneutic psychic ‘field’” (Freudian 90, 102). Like Derrida before him, the principal lesson that Bersani draws from Freud’s failure to arrive at the “essence” of sexuality, to narrate in some satisfactory way its nature and development, is the lesson that Freud himself was loath to accept: that sexuality is “its own antagonist,” a sign of “the mind’s failure to account for, to find the terms adequate to, the body’s experience” (17, 64). Hence, while Bersani does draw attention to the phenomenal effects of the ecstatic experience, it is important to note that the very compulsion to repeat that experience, and even the “pleasurable-nonpleasurable tension” that comes from its pursuit, already registers the operation in the subject of something that suggests the subject’s being not-whole, of an illogic that runs against “the sovereignty of the pleasure principle,” that pays no heed to either biological or social imperatives (including the imperative of survival), and that thereby suggests that there is something awry in “the nature of the sexual function itself” (18).

If the subject is undone by sexuality, in other words, it is because sexuality is, for Bersani, already contaminated by this something, the “daemonic,” pulsive force of the (death) drive that moves with no purpose, no aim, and that brings the subject only to the limit that is immanent to it, the site of unknowability or the “nonhermeneutic psychic field” at which point meaningless enjoyment emerges. Jouissance here does not need to be conceived in orgasmic terms, nor tied to a specific sexuality, for what is at stake is the queerness of sexuality tout court. As Bersani writes: “Sexuality manifests itself in a variety of sexual acts and in a variety of presumably nonsexual acts, but its constitutive excitement is the same in the loving copulation between two adults, the thrashing of a boundlessly submissive slave by his pitiless master, and the masturbation of the fetishist carried away by an ardently fondled silver slipper” (40). Indeed, part of the reason sexuality remains disturbing, why it might be said to represent “knowledge of pressures which resist any theorizing whatsoever,” is that it takes no specific form or object and yet remains recognizable even when manifested in or as “presumably nonsexual acts.” A “functional aberration of the species,” sexuality poses a problem for thought, not only for those who wish to grasp its true nature, as Freud did, but for the subject herself, for whom sexuality also marks a gap in (self-)knowledge, an otherness to oneself (39–40, 90). Sexuality, in this way, names the difference within that renders the subject unknowable. It is, as Bersani writes, “that which profoundly disorients any effort whatsoever to constitute a human subject” (101); it is “the operator of the inhuman,” “the operator of dehumanization” (Zupančič 7).

This de-cohering, inhuman dimension of sexuality is already captured well in the “image of the grown man with his legs high in the air” that has become the principal representation of the self-shattering subject. The image, we might now notice, does not portray a scene of “orgasmic rupture,” nor even a sexual encounter, and yet the figure it conjures appears somehow already possessed by an excess that renders it both more and less than any notion of selfhood might allow. If this image is “intolerable,” then it is not simply because it undermines a “homophobic imaginary” (Musser, Sensual 72), or because it subverts normative notions of masculinity (Nguyen 8), as is often suggested, but because it “advertises” the “mysterious ‘excentricity’” of the subject (Bersani, Baudelaire 60), the ontological uncertainty that interrupts “the legibility of the subject’s ability to know, indeed, to think itself” (Wiegman, “Sex” 234), even, I would add, to think itself as “queer.” The “undeadness” associated both with the drive and with gay men, particularly (though not only) in the time of AIDS, rings loudly in this image, as it presents the self-shattering subject as a subject parasitized by a jouissance that functions not only as surplus enjoyment, but as a surplus enjoyment that bespeaks a lack of being, a “loss of self” that the “self can have” (Berlant and Edelman 47), a minus that gets added, a “with-without” (Zupančič 58).¹⁰ Male homosexuality here plays an illustrative role, and for good reason. Even before the advent of HIV/AIDS, after all, it was already associated with the threat of being lost to meaningless enjoyment, already tied to sexuality’s ungrounding psychic and social effects: identity crises, amorality, lawlessness, placelessness, futurelessness, and, of course, death itself. Indeed, homosexuality has long represented the “the risk of the sexual,” insofar as it has been made to stand in for the inhuman drive that betrays the laws of both “man” and nature and hence puts into question their very status as law, as well as the solidity of the categories of meaning and being that rely upon them.

Edelman offers a useful way to understand the nature of this threat in Homographesis, where he argues that the peril posed by gay desire can be understood as stemming from its introduction of “a ‘sexual’ difference internal to male identity,” a difference that threatens to remain undetected, and which thereby risks “the stability of the paradigms through which sexual differentiation can be interpreted and gender difference can be enforced” (9–12). Gay desire, in other words, can be seen as that which makes “man” different from itself, the surplus that must be excluded, exteriorized, in order for “man” to retain a semblance of self-sameness. The writing of the “homosexual” thus emerges as a mode of defense, an attempt to contain the negativity of sexuality by making it appear as a form of social difference in its own right.¹¹ What this procedure accomplishes, however, is the making of a personage that serves as the “reified figure of the unknowable within the field of sexuality” (Edelman, Homographesis xv), whose appearance then comes to represent a threat against personhood in general. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” Bersani suggests that the unconscious representation of the “grown man with his legs high in the air unable to refuse suicidal ecstasy” might have been frightening enough to drive the “good citizens of Acadia, Florida” to burn down the house of three hemophiliac children said to have been infected with HIV. If so, it is precisely because these “good citizens” feared the “nightmare of ontological obscenity” (29) that homosexuality was made to figure, or, put differently, because they did not want to be “snuffed out by gay jouissance.” Phobic discourse and violence, in other words, respond to the “menace” that the male homosexual presents to “coherent self-definition” (Bersani, Baudelaire 61); they are attempts to deny the ontological uncertainty reflected back by a mode of enjoyment that registers the lack of being common to all or that speaks to the nightmare that lurks within all “dreams of difference.” While such attempts have typically involved the portrayal of gay men as possessed by an “unquenchable appetite for destruction,” we might also note that these same attempts can and not infrequently have employed a contradictory rhetoric that saves the terms of personhood from the negativity of sexuality by turning the latter into a sign of the former (Is the Rectum 18). This is what happens, for instance, in the phobic rhetoric that claims that with AIDS gay men were actually getting exactly what they wanted, that their suicidal-cum-murderous enjoyment was a function of their desire and will, a sign of their indifference to life and death—in other words, an expression of their sovereignty. This rhetoric sustains the fantasy of wholeness by casting as evidence for it the very thing that puts it into question.

The fact that a recapitulation of the defensive logic that undergirds phobic responses to the “nightmare of ontological obscenity” can be made to dovetail with arguments raised against self-shattering from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum may seem surprising, though perhaps less so if one recalls that “Is the Rectum a Grave?” also takes aim at proponents of radical sex such as Pat Califia and Gayle Rubin, as well as at gay historians and critics, including Michel Foucault. Famously implicating these figures, along with Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon, in the “redemptive reinvention of sex,” Bersani made a point of showing that the aversion to ontological negativity cuts across political and ideological lines and hence cannot simply be “projected onto heterosexuals as an explanation for their hostility” (27). One could argue that Bersani saw queer and feminist thought, even in the mid-1980s, as already given to reparative readings, already eager to render sex “less disturbing,” “more respectful of ‘personhood’ than it has been,” and to argue for its utility as an instrument of what we now term queer or alternative self- and world-making projects (22).¹² Recognizing the draw of such projects for those who might be powerless, not least for gay men in the time of AIDS, Bersani understood well that they were responses to conditions of social negation, to forms of violence that had to be challenged. In a sense, Bersani was already thinking through the ways in which the realities of social negation invite or even require those who suffer them to renounce the ontological negativity of sexuality, or to participate in the reproduction of the same defensive logic that underprops the conditions of social negation they are made to endure.

The context of the AIDS crisis is again crucial here, for not only did it literalize that threat of self-less-ness that inheres in sexuality, it also created a situation in which “turning away from sex” would become a “practical necessity” (27, 25). This “turning away,” enacted literally via the retreat from promiscuity that was necessitated by AIDS, was for Bersani also the general logic underlying the conversion of homosexuality into a legitimate form of social difference, such that it came to re-present, even in otherwise radical formulations, an example of “the diversity of human sexuality in all its variant forms” (Weeks), a “benign variation” that demonstrates the “radical pluralism” of human being (Rubin), or a “life-style” that bespeaks “unforeseen kinds of relationships,” if not an alternate “form of life” altogether (Foucault) (25–27). Under such formulations, homosexuality ceases to represent the threat of ontological uncertainty and is made to serve instead as ontological grounds for an other mode of being. In that sense, all these formulations speak, albeit in varying ways, to how the affirmation of homosexuality as a form of “difference” requires first and foremost the subtraction from homosexuality of the subtraction it was meant to represent, a negation of the negativity to which it gave form. In the face of the AIDS crisis (and even of homophobia more broadly), gay men, one could say, could not “afford” to not take part in this negation of negativity, to not make homosexuality mean something rather than nothing, or to not render it in a manner that would enable some form of recognition and protection within and against a social order that was responding to the mass death of gay men with murderous representations of homosexuality.

The necessity of claiming a place in the world and of recovering some form of selfhood in the face of horror was surely not lost on Bersani, whose actual injunction in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” is far more modest than critics allow, though not for that reason much more easily heeded: We should, he suggests, “lament the practical necessity” of turning away from sex, and not lose sight of the fact that the self is but a “practical convenience” (25, 30). Issued in the context of the AIDS crisis, such an injunction must be read as a warning against the invitation to be complicit in the “promotion of the self into an ethical ideal,” an invitation that speaks directly and with great force to those who, shattered by violence and precarity, are wont to see nonsovereignty, the lack of being, as but a historically contingent condition that requires correction and not the shared truth of subjectivity itself (I will return to this). Set in relation to this warning, self-shattering might thus be better understood not as an expression of the privilege of the “white gay male” subject, but as that from which this subject had to have turned in order to become the figure of privilege it now is. The story of homonormativity from which this figure principally derives can even be retold as the then-future history of homosexuality that Bersani hoped to forestall by insisting on the importance of “losing sight of the self” even at a moment when gay men could not afford to (30), that is, as the story of homosexuality’s extrication from negativity, its shedding of the “connotations of queerness” (Edelman, Bad Education 47).

This extrication is neither geographically uniform nor permanent; it is, however, thorough enough that in the signifier “white gay male,” “white” now seems able to restore the privilege that “gay” once subtracted from “male” with no resistance whatsoever. It is also thorough enough that it feels entirely appropriate for homosexuality to be left out of the list of “catachreses” for nonbeing that Edelman invokes in his Bad Education, a list that includes queerness, Blackness, woman, and trans* (47). If homosexuality has managed to “save” itself from this list, however, it has necessarily come at a price, for as Edelman argues in No Future, “By denying our identification with the negativity of [the] drive … those of us inhabiting the place of the queer may be able to cast off that queerness and enter the properly political sphere, but only by shifting the figural burden of queerness to someone else” (27). This central claim, like Bersani’s warning against “being drawn into the … warfare between men and women,” goes unremarked in critiques of No Future, which then proceed to disidentify with negativity on the grounds that doing otherwise is “not an option” “for some queers.” It could be argued, of course, that in such critiques the very premise of the warning is refused, that what is hoped for is a future in which no one at all bears the burden of figuring nonbeing. Such a claim would be more plausible, however, if the critiques themselves did not repeatedly conjure a figure that represents a negativity to be renounced, a suicidal jouissance that threatens to “snuff out” dreams of difference.

III

The warnings sounded by Bersani and Edelman draw our attention to the underlying psychic structure from which violence stems, the defensive posture adopted against the negativity that operates from within and that must be repressed in order to secure “the fixity and coherence of the ego’s form” (Edelman, No Future 51). It is difficult to formulate a politics with this structure in mind, for it implies that the search for ontological ground, even when undertaken as part of a righteous struggle, is implicated in the reproduction of the world as it already is. Bersani’s injunction to not stop “losing sight of the self,” even when the opposite may seem imperative, might be reframed here as a call to bear the weight of this complicity, to retain our faculties of suspicion even with regard to the sense of self we cannot not claim, and to the worlds we must build to sustain it. Holding open space for negativity entails a refusal to defend the defenses that one needs; it means allowing for the incoherences that render the subject different from itself, unknown to itself, rather than bearing down on a “right to distinction” (Marriott, “Blackness” 27) or on the sacrosanct value of the “dreams of difference” with which the subject must identify in order to give itself a form.

We must be careful here, however, not to cast the embrace of negativity as but a sacrifice that must be made in order to forestall the reproduction of violence, as though the (queer) subject who says “no” to negativity gives up nothing, or nothing apart from that which has been imposed upon it as a “figural burden” (Edelman, No Future 22). Moving beyond the role that negativity plays in the broader operation of violence, I want to draw attention here to what negativity means for the subject itself, and particularly for the “queer of color” or the racialized subject, whose interests are assumed to lie in the assertion and recognition of the difference she represents and not in “the felicitous erasure of people as persons” (Bersani and Phillips 38). If nothing else, we must acknowledge that the relationship of the racialized subject to difference is much more ambivalent than scholarly writing tends to acknowledge.¹³ She would not dream of difference, after all, if it were not also that which haunts her existence, the indelible mark that allows her body to be read as this or that, and through which she is made to repeatedly learn, as Fanon writes, that “it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that is already there, pre-existing, waiting for me” (134). Meaning awaits the racialized subject because her entrance into the world, even more so than others, is anticipated by the signifier, which grants her access to symbolic existence, gives her a place in the social order, on the condition that she be placed, rendered legible within a system of differentiation that will bind her to signifying chains and through which may find herself “an object in the midst of other objects” (109). Calls to foreground difference in the form of categories such as race and gender are often presented as injunctions to recognize “modes of particularity within the social [that] are constitutive of subjecthood” (Muñoz, Cruising 95). It bears reminding, however, that such categories are as much instruments of homogenization as modes of particularity; they are ordering systems that require the subject to see itself in and be identified with the signifiers of difference that appear in the field of the Other. “The word difference,” as David Marriott writes, “must be understood not only as a signifying relation but also a relation of force that violently inscribes what it segregates” (Lacan 16). The recognition of difference, that is, cannot be seen straightforwardly as a challenge to the violence of erasure, for “difference” itself requires the effacement of the “irreducible ambiguities that subvert the subject’s very possibility of determining the limits of what she or he means or is as difference” (16).¹⁴ Speaking to this violence, Marquis Bey reminds that “an ontology that categorizes people along lines of race and gender [is] an ontology that is not innocently descriptive but adamantly terroristic.” It is a mode of circumscription, “a form of attempted ontological community, capturing and disallowing exiting of those forced to ‘belong’, a priori, to that community.”

Though Bey does not use the language of psychoanalysis, in speaking of ontological capture by the terms of symbolic difference they are, in essence, insisting on that which psychoanalysis works to preserve: an understanding of the subject as radically indeterminate, incalculable, unaccounted for by “the system of differentially constituted signifiers … that determines all of the distinctions that can be made and that organize reality for us” (Viego 5, 14). Bersani’s insistence on seeing sexuality as marking the presence of a “nonhermeneutic psychic field” must be read in this light, as part of the broader resistance that psychoanalysis mounts against accounts that render the subject transparent and knowable by casting it as the product of discursive construction. This resistance finds its fullest articulation, of course, in the work of Lacan, who argues that the very presence of a “nonhermeneutic psychic field” can be traced to the structure of language itself, or to the manner in which the symbolic emerges with a hole “built in,” a missing signifier that renders the field of signification constitutively incomplete, inconsistent, “not whole” (Zupančič 17–18). This “gap” or lack in the symbolic bespeaks the groundlessness of the purely differential logic from which meaning derives; it designates “the non-sens that falls between signifiers” (Marriott, Lacan 17), the extradiscursive dimension of the Real that allows us to say that “something always appears to be missing from any representation,” or that the world formed by the signifier is “not all” (Copjec, Read 37).

Importantly, in Lacan’s formulation, this lack in the symbolic is inscribed within the subject, which finds itself split, divided, “castrated” upon entry into language. This originary loss or “fundamental lack of being” leaves the subject forever without any “firm hold in the other order of symbolic existence” (Salecl 6); it is what renders the subject, by definition, a body in fragments, or, in Bersani’s terms, shattered. The point here, as Renata Salecl writes, isn’t only that the subject is “constitutively ‘lacking’ its object,” but rather, more radically, that “the lacking object is ultimately the subject itself, that is, the lack is the lack of the subject’s being” (5–6). This formulation is crucial, for in placing an irreducible negativity at the heart of subjectivity, by insisting on a lack that no symbol can counter (Lacan, Seminar X 136), it allows us to delaminate subjectivity from the “modes of particularity” that determine the subject’s place in the system of differentiation that constitutes reality. In other words, it allows us to say that the subject “is not where it is represented” (Voruz 176); or, to paraphrase Lacan, “I am where I am not” (Érits 430).

This is not to suggest, as “colorblind” discourses might, that the terms of socio-symbolic difference can simply be done away with. The subject remains, after all, a subject of the symbolic; it depends on the signifier that structures reality. The psychoanalytic account of the subject, however, gives us a means to apprehend the nature of this dependence and, importantly, to regain the critical distance from logics of identity and difference that has been ceded in the name of “repair.” It reminds us, for starters, that difference itself is produced and secured paranoically, as a result of the subject’s attempt to cover over its lack, to disavow castration by turning the wholeness that was “never had” into “something lost,” something to be obtained through the recovery of a missing piece (Zupančič 51). This relation to the lacking object, a relation of desire, is an ordinary part of subjectivity. It is a relation, however, that is both limited and fraught, for it operates under a fantasy of wholeness that only makes available a mode of enjoyment doomed to disappointment. This is what Lacan refers to as “phallic jouissance,” a phrase, to recall, that Musser uses to describe “self-shattering,” but that in fact designates for Lacan the restricted jouissance of the subject who believes that there is a subject who “already inhabits a position of sovereign subjectivity,” an exception, a noncastrated One who has a “self to shatter,” or who has access to a jouissance that one does not. Though disavowed, this figure serves as the horizon for being in critiques such as Musser’s; it is the figure invoked, for instance, in Muñoz’s much-cited claim that “racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity” (Cruising 95), a claim that implies that the place of the sovereign exists, and that we therefore might be able to occupy it, if only …, in the future. …

Here, the subject’s lack of being is transformed into a “something that is missing” that is “always in the horizon” (174, 11). In this way, it rearticulates the displacement of negativity that being requires and that allows difference to function as an organizing principle in the first place. As we have seen, difference can only appear through the elimination of the “difference within the very category of difference” (Marriott, “Blackness” 31). This is demonstrated by Edelman’s account of how the writing of the “homosexual” secures sexual difference, and by my suggestion that homosexuality’s reinvention might be seen as the product of its disarticulation from the ontological negativity it once represented. A similar line of argument can be found in David Eng’s Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, one of the first major contributions to queer of color critique. Through a rereading of Freud’s account of fetishism, Eng argues that the “racial castration” of Asian men—their longstanding feminization and homosexualization in the US/Western imaginary—can be seen as part of an attempt to secure the “tenuous boundaries” of the white male heterosexual subject against the threat posed by the “homecoming of castration,” or by a lack that returns in the form, most notably, of homosexual desires for the racial other (146–53). Betraying the white male heterosexual subject’s “flagging masculine position,” homosexuality here again names the surplus enjoyment that reveals the inconsistency of the subject, the excess that shows that there is no signifier, no symbolic identity, into which the subject can “pour itself without remainder” (Johnston 203). What imperils white male heterosexuality, the object of its castration anxiety, is a threat that comes from within, the peril posed by the revelation of its lack of being, or of the absent foundation for the “difference” it is supposed to mean. This lack is what racial castration, as a psychic defense, then attempts to contain through displacement, which here produces not only “homosexual difference,” as in Edelman’s account, but gender and racial difference in the form of the castrated/feminized Asian male subject, who thereby discovers that what his body “means” is the deficiency the white male subject ex-corporates from himself.

Eng does not quite frame it in this manner, but his analysis points to the way racial difference emerges as a means to redress ontological uncertainty, often, as in this case, through the production of a racialized figure that gives form to lack. However, while Racial Castration offers a convincing account of the racialization and gendering of Asian men, it also demonstrates the difficulty of reconciling psychoanalysis with the concerns of queer of color critique. For while Eng’s analysis of white male heterosexual anxiety seems to imply the need for an ethics grounded in a refusal to disavow castration, or an affirmation of the subject as constitutively lacking, Racial Castration cannot actually articulate or adopt such an ethics, since the work as a whole is itself an objection to having been castrated, a protest against being rendered lacking by a white gaze that refuses “to see at the site of the Asian male body a penis that is there to see” (2). This line, repeated in various ways throughout Racial Castration, gives voice to the fantasy of wholeness and the castration anxiety woven into the very complaint that Eng’s text formalizes. The problem, it seems, is that while Eng’s critique of white male heterosexuality acknowledges castration as a universal condition, that is, “as the metaphoric re-inscription and containment of a loss which happens much earlier, at the point of linguistic entry” (Silverman, qtd. in Eng 154), this condition is unaccounted for in the case of the Asian male subject. No longer designating a lack that no symbol can counter, castration instead becomes, when thought from the vantage of the racial subject, a form of privation “gratuitously imposed from without,” an effect of racial/colonial injustice, a wrong to be corrected (Johnston 204). In other words, castration in Racial Castration comes to name both ontological negativity and social negation, but the slippage from one to the other goes unremarked, as the questions raised by the former vanish once concern is centered on the racialized subject’s experience of lack. Eng seems to recognize the problem in the book’s final chapter but resolves it by displacing the fantasy of “a psychically ‘whole’ Asian American subject” onto “cultural nationalist” projects that prescribe an ideal, heterosexual, male Asian American subject, and by positioning against it a “queer critical methodology that intersects Asian American identity formation across multiple axes of difference” (209–10, 216). While the latter might challenge homogeny at the level of group identity, however, the introduction of “multiple axes of difference” does not challenge the fantasy of a “whole” subject in any way; all it can do is render that whole multifaceted or authorize those who embody previously unacknowledged forms of difference to claim an “intersectional” form of wholeness themselves.¹⁵

The fantasy of wholeness is opposed not to particularity, but to the lack of being, the negativity that corresponds to the “hole” in the symbolic that the introduction of differential variables attempts to fill. Failing to see this, the view of lack as a condition to be rectified by disavowing negativity continues to shape queer of color critique. This can be seen in Nguyen Tan Hoang’s A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation, a book that might be read as a rejoinder of sorts to Eng’s Racial Castration. For gay Asian men, Nguyen writes, racial castration complicates the feminized position of “bottom,” which comes to be seen as “an abject identity that one has to renounce and get over” (114). Against such views, Nguyen sets out to make a case for the affirmation of femininity and bottomhood, and the openness to “vulnerability, receptivity, and risk” that they represent (179). While this might suggest agreement with Bersani’s call to embrace “the risk of the sexual,” however, Nguyen ends up echoing the standard queer studies critique of Bersani instead. “The joyful abdication of power only makes sense,” he writes, “in the context of those with something to give up.” “Suicidal anal sexuality” and the “humiliation of the self” cannot be extolled in the case of Asian American male subjects since, “[f]or those already relegated to the lowest rung of the sexual and social ladder, an unqualified embrace of powerlessness only leads to an amplification of their subjugation and lowly position” (19). Nguyen then proceeds to offer what can only be described as a redemptive reading of bottomhood, highlighting film and video works that demonstrate how “dwelling in the abject space of bottomhood and femininity can be a powerful mode of accessing social and sexual recognition” (156–57), or that mobilize “the threatening force of abjection to assert and affirm gay Asian subjecthood” (191). In search of signifying support, Nguyen ends up phallicizing bottomhood itself. One sees this, for instance, in his reading of the closing scene of the Thai film, The Adventures of Iron Pussy III, in which the titular drag heroine is shown on all fours looking back over his shoulder to the camera that takes the place of a potentially murderous white partner. This cliffhanger, Nguyen tells us, “reveals that though he might get fucked, Iron Pussy is not fucked over. … His bottomhood flirts with danger and gambles with the white devil, but, we suspect, she will ultimately come out on top” (185–186).

A stark contrast to Bersani’s “grown man with his legs high in the air,” this image presents bottomhood as loss-less, for even if death were to come from the encounter described it would have been the result of an exercise of agency, a flirting with danger. Far from representing a “nightmare of ontological obscenity,” the bottom here is armed with that missing piece (a phallus, an “iron pussy”) that secures it against the threat of (racial) castration and allows it to “affirm gay Asian subjecthood.” Like Eng, Nguyen does not have an account of an originary negativity that is operative within the Asian male subject. As such, he is not inclined to see that the conversion of bottomhood into a “new mode of social recognition” is not a purely corrective gesture (19), that saying no to being shattered means reproducing the castration anxiety that fuels the racial castration of Asian men. Here we might note that Nguyen’s fear that self-shattering would “amplify” the violence of racial castration proceeds from and repeats the conflation of ontological negativity with social negation. Racial castration, however, does not produce the lack of being to which ontological negativity refers. Rather, it is, or should be seen as, a cut that leads to a lack of signifier, a violence that deprives the subject in question of a means to veil the lack that is common to all. Read this way, one might argue more broadly that it is not self-shattering that amplifies social negation, but social negation that amplifies castration anxiety, compelling those who find themselves “deprivileged” to renounce the lack that is already within, to seek refuge in the signifier, and to find sustenance and enjoyment in the attempt to reclaim a wholeness that never was.

As Lacan argues, castration anxiety takes nothing for its object; this nothing, however, is rendered proximate by the insistence in the subject of a shattering “jouissance that exceeds its limits,” a surplus enjoyment that signals “a threat to the status of the defended I” (Lacan, Seminar X 263). In Lacan’s later work, this jouissance is also referred to, more specifically, as “feminine jouissance,” a designation that, I would argue, corresponds to jouissance as it appears in the work of Bersani and Edelman. Having no necessary relation to biological sex or gender, feminine jouissance can be understood, in brief, as the supplementary enjoyment available to the subject that “grounds itself as being not-whole in situating itself in the phallic function [castration]” (Lacan, Seminar XX 72), or whose being, in other words, is not structured through the repression of castration by the fantasy of the exception (the Father who has a self to shatter, the “sovereign prince of futurity”). The subject “sexuated” under the feminine logic is thus, like all subjects, castrated; however, without recourse to the fantasy of noncastration, she does not experience castration as a threat, and as such, is able to retain a relationship to the lack in the symbolic (to “the Other as barred”) and to manufacture, in turn, at the very site of that lack, an Other jouissance about which nothing can be said, for it serves as “a placeholder for the knowledge which does not exist” (Zupančič 52–53).⁷ Whereas in Nguyen’s account, feminine enjoyment is reclaimed as a means to secure a place for the subject in the symbolic, in Lacan’s formulation, feminine jouissance is privileged for precisely the opposite reason: it is that which guarantees that the subject cannot be placed or determined, and which “leaves open the possibility of there being something … that cannot … be said to exist in the symbolic order” (Copjec, Read 224).¹⁶

The implications of this formulation are far-reaching. As Joan Copjec writes: “The famous formulation of a feminine ‘not-all’, that is, the proposal that there is no whole, no ‘all’ of woman, or that she is not One, is fundamentally an answer not just to the question of feminine being but to being as such. It is not only feminine being but being in general that resists being assembled into a whole” (Imagine 6). What is at stake in feminine being, as Lacan describes it, is the “bit of nonbeing at the subject’s core” (7), the resistance to assemblage that gets lost when sexuality is stripped of its negativity and regarded instead as a feature of selfhood to be claimed, a means to assert the subject’s “positionality” within a given symbolic field. Lacan’s formulation makes clear, however, that this negativity that gets renounced is not a luxury that “deprivileged” subjects cannot “afford,” but the basis for indetermination, the grounds for unknowability that deprivileged subjects cannot afford to lose. Registered in the form of a supplementary jouissance that “marks the point at which the Other does not know” (Zupančič 54), negativity is that which prevents the subject from coinciding with itself, and which thereby ensures that she will remain “radically incalculable,” “a cause for which no signifier can account” (Copjec, Imagine 7; Read 209). For those who find themselves anticipated by meaning at every turn, whose place is always designated in advance, (feminine) jouissance offers no alternate means to ground one’s symbolic existence, no materials with which to “reclaim and remake selfhood” (Musser) or “assert and affirm subjecthood” (Nguyen). In offering nothing, however, jouissance affords the subject that which nothing else can: an “opening onto nonbeing (‘dèsêtre’) that … subtracts it from sense” (Edelman, Bad Education 213–14). Hence, in Lacan’s formulation, the principal bearer of feminine jouissance—”Woman”—”does not exist” but rather “ex-ists,” meaning only that we have no way to determine her place, no means to know who “woman” is, no grounds to say “all women.” “We can’t talk about Woman (La femme),” writes Lacan, not because she stands outside the symbolic, but because the lack in the symbolic is inscribed in her without being veiled (Seminar XX 73). This lack is inscribed in all subjects, as we have noted; most, however, would rather search for that which cannot be found—a means to fill this lack—rather than bear the jouissance that Bersani describes, in affirmation of the feminine, as the “suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (18, emphasis added).

IV

In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz famously defines queerness as “that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (1). Read against the author’s intent, this definition might be said to resonate well with the psychoanalytic account of the subject as the subject of jouissance. If, after all, jouissance designates “a disturbed relation to one’s own body” (Lacan, qtd. in Zupančič 89) that marks the presence of a void at the heart of the signifying order, the lack that no symbol can counter, then we might conceive of it precisely as a queer feeling that registers the incompleteness of the world, its being not-all. For Muñoz, however, the feeling that something is missing serves as an injunction to look to the horizon in the hopes of catching a “glimpse” or “kernel” of utopia (Cruising 52, 174), that is, of a world in which the subject does not feel that something is missing, or in which the subject, following Muñoz’s own definition, does not feel queer. For psychoanalysis, on the other hand, the task is precisely “to hold fast [to] this little missing piece” (Brinkema, Forms 202), to not miss the lack, for it is only because there is something missing that there remains a surplus existence, an ex-istence “without predicate” (Copjec, Read 4).

The implications of these two contrary dispositions can be gleaned from Muñoz’s own discussion of the “ghosts of public sex.” Looking to nostalgic writings that recall the public cruising scenes lost in the wake of the AIDS crisis, most notably the poet John Giorno’s beautiful, lurid account of anonymous sex at the Prince Street toilets in New York, Muñoz argues that such writing can be seen as a mode of “world-making … functioning and coming into play through the performance of queer utopian memory” (37). Though Giorno himself writes that “the great thing about anonymous sex is you don’t bring your private life or personal world. No politics or inhibiting concepts, no closed rules or fixed responses,” Muñoz insists that “we can still read a powerful political impulse in Giorno’s text,” and find in his writing “a picture of utopian transport and a reconfiguration of the social, a reimaging of our actual conditions of possibility” (qtd. In Muñoz 36, 38). Utopia, he writes, “lets us imagine a space outside of heteronormativity. It permits us to conceptualize new worlds and realities” (35). If we accept Muñoz’s claim, however, that such writing allows us to “[bear] witness to a queer sex utopia” (34), then we must ask: What brought those men to the toilet in the first place? What force made the “reconfiguration of the social” possible? Though such questions brings us into the realm of speculation, it seems fair to say, that the men who came to the toilets never meant to make a world, never showed up in hopes of catching a glimpse of utopia, at least not if by “utopia” we mean a world without the heteronormativity that was (and remains) the condition of possibility for fucking in toilets. Acknowledging that those men probably had no laudable aims, no good reason to be at the toilets, however, should not lead us to conclude that they had no desire for a better world or that what they really wanted was for things to stay the same, for a phobic order to remain supreme so that they could continue to extract some pleasure from its margins. Rather, what the lack of aim suggests is that perhaps such spaces cannot be understood in terms of desire at all, that the engine that brought gay men to public toilets then and that continues to bring them to such spaces, again and again, wherever they still exist, runs separately from and with indifference to the want and need for a place “in the other order of symbolic existence” (Salecl 6). This much is made clear in the passage from Giorno that Muñoz quotes yet overwrites with utopian longing, where Giorno claims, unambiguously, that what made scenes of anonymous public sex “great,” what made them worth writing about in the first place, was the loss that served as both the price and reward of admission: the loss of the individual’s private world and of the world itself (the world of politics, concepts, rules), or what Bersani surely would have described as “the felicitous erasure of people as persons.” If Muñoz is right, as I think he is, in claiming that something like a queer world is formed in places such as public toilets, then it is because and only because of the negativity that Cruising Utopia asks us to leave behind, in the past, and that remains operative still in those who are unable to refuse the compulsion to return to such spaces. Put differently, one could say that the engine for “new realities” is nothing other than the drive that brings the subject back to the point where it finds that it lacks not the outside world but itself (Lacan, Seminar X 119), and where it thus remains unknown to the Other, anonymous.

Bobby Benedicto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University.

Notes

1. Muñoz was, of course, right to push for the decentering of the white gay male experience and canon in queer studies and deserves enormous credit for laying out, in unapologetic terms, a trajectory that would help secure the transformation of the field into a hospitable space for work conducted by and about queer people of color. My own work would not have been possible without the path-clearing work of Muñoz, Martin Manalansan, Roderick Ferguson, Gayatri Gopinath, David Eng, and other queer scholars of color writing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As I see it, this essay is, first and foremost, a critique of the framing of queer of color critique offered from within the field.

2. Part of my skepticism here comes from the absence of a substantial literature that would support the claim that a “turn” had ever taken place in queer studies. Indeed, barring a few exceptions, most references to the “antirelational turn” or “antisocial thesis” name only Bersani and Edelman, along with unnamed “other authors.” Bersani, famously, never even thought of himself as part of queer studies. One of the most curious things about the debate surrounding the antisocial thesis is that it has persisted for so long in the absence of any identifiable proponents apart from Edelman. The thesis survives and exists principally as a foil. It is invoked in order to be rejected. I would note, moreover, that the linking of the thesis/turn to a gay male interest in “sexual abandon” and risky behavior is itself hard to support, given that No Future makes no reference at all to gay male sexual practices. The figures it uses to represent “queerness” (Scrooge, Silas Marner, Leonard in North by Northwest, the birds in The Birds) are, if anything, strikingly asexual, though of course readable as “gay-coded.” Lastly, it is worth noting that theories of self-negation have also been formulated by female scholars. Indeed, one could argue that the text that comes closest to Bersani’s position in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” isn’t Edelman’s No Future but Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the Margins.

3. For a critique of the notion of the “otherwise,” see Palmer; on the notion of “world,” see Barber.

4. For a critique of the “reparative turn” in queer and feminist theory more broadly, see Wiegman, “The Times We’re In.” See also Berlant and Edelman; Ferguson; Hanson; and Puar.

5. There are, of course, major works in queer of color critique that cannot be characterized along the same lines. See, for instance, Ferguson and Puar.

6. Eugenie Brinkema offers a similar line of criticism when she writes of the “suspicion of suspicion” that follows from Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid and reparative reading (“Irrumation”).

7. Much of Bersani’s work from the mid-1990s onwards was dedicated to formulating “new relational modes” (a phrase he borrows from Foucault). For Bersani, however, a relational mode could only be described as “new” if it did not reproduce the narcissistic ego defenses, the logic of difference, that defines relationality as we know it. As such, his account of relationality was still predicated on the negativity of sex, the “pleasurable renunciation of one’s own ego boundaries” (Is the Rectum? 175), and thus ultimately incompatible with the more generative and affirmative approaches to relationality embraced in queer studies. As Juana Rodríguez writes, for instance: “(W)hile Bersani leaves open the possibility of potentially reconstituting sociality through a ‘curative collapsing of social difference’, this desired erasure of difference as the only available means of touching sociality comes dangerously close to advocating a color-blind, gender-blind, difference-blind future. For while Bersani ‘prefers the possibilities of the future to the determinations of the past’ (Bersani and Phillips viii), he locates his accounts of sexual exchange in a ‘universal relatedness grounded in the absence of relations, in the felicitous erasure of people as persons’” (10–11).

8. I discuss Bersani’s failure to address race more directly elsewhere. See “Failure” and “Agents and Objects of Death.”

9. I am thinking here, for instance, of the Afro-pessimist affirmation of negativity in the face of Black social death. It would be foolish, of course, to suggest that Black social death and the experience of (white) gay men during the AIDS crisis can be treated analogously. The nature of the violence that Bersani confronts is not the same as the world-forming structural antagonism with which Afro-pessimism is concerned. If anything, the AIDS crisis, as experienced by white gay men in the West, offers a clear example of what Frank Wilderson describes as “contingent violence,” a “provisional moment” of exposure to being nothing (16, 36). The point I want to make here, however, is that if there is a certain affinity between the thought of Bersani (and Edelman) and Afro-pessimism, it comes from the shared understanding, unthinkable to many, that one can (if not must) affirm the place of death that one is given.

10. Admittedly, I have been reading Bersani here in a manner that brings him closer to Lacan than perhaps he would have liked. Indeed, though he is not infrequently referred to as a “Lacanian” in discussions of the antisocial thesis, Bersani was at times highly critical of and often indifferent to Lacan’s thought. Most notably, his development of “homo-ness” and “impersonal narcissism” were part of an attempt to reimagine desire without lack and castration, an unthinkable proposition for any Lacanian (see Benedicto, “Failure”). In an interview conducted by Mikko Tuhkanen, he offers the following remark: “I would never write anything on Lacan apart from simply mentioning this or that idea. First of all, I don’t understand a lot of what I read, and I’m always astonished because I discover that so many people whom—to put it in a very conceited way—I think of as less intelligent than I am write books about Lacan. That always astounds me” (Bersani and Tuhkanen 279).

11. In effect, Edelman’s argument in Homographesis supplies the motor for Foucault’s description of the discursive construction of the “homosexual,” its emergence as a “species.” In Foucault’s rendering, unsatisfyingly, the explanation for the writing of the homosexual into existence appears to be power.

12. Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption, which takes aim at interpretations that see art as “repair[ing] inherently damaged or valueless experience” or as having a “beneficently reconstructive function,” is in essence already a substantive critique of reparative reading (1).

13. Madhavi Menon’s Indifference to Difference is a notable exception.

14. Few scholars have, in my view, pushed psychoanalysis to address questions of race more forcefully and effectively than Marriott. His reading of Lacan, however, poses some genuine (though not unwelcome) difficulties for readers working on race but not necessarily on Blackness, as he often arrives at insights concerning the universal operation of the signifier by reframing its logic in the specific terms of Blackness/anti-Blackness (or, more often, negrophobia). While it is clear that, for Marriott, Blackness is not reducible to racial Blackness but rather designates the dimension of non-being/non-meaning opened up by the signifier, the very decision to name that dimension “Blackness” (not unlike Edelman’s use of “queerness”) unavoidably pours meaning back into the gap or void to which the term refers. Like Edelman, Marriott does not ignore this dilemma, but rather employs it to make claims that simultaneously address the general structure of meaning-making and the culture it produces. This makes it difficult to determine what can and cannot be said about our common subjection to language or even if it makes sense to speak of any such common subjection. As he writes, with regards to the signifier as “racist function”: “Thus Lacan reads segregare as if it were “naturally” rooted in a phantasm (of meaning) that we are all enslaved by, but only because we already know ourselves to be segregated from the infinite black abysses of the signifier that we recognize as the sign of our own irreducible lack. But why present this phantasm as a universal one, as if the signified were nègre, and we are all slaves in our relation to difference? But here again, who is this we? And why does it feel so symptomatic?” (22, 13).

15. For a further critique of intersectionality, see Davis and Dean, 54–86.

16. Musser also employs the designation “feminine jouissance” but repurposes it to describe a form of relationality without negativity: “[a jouissance] of listening and being with the Other … [that] emphasizes moments of connection with the world [and] shows the self as a being-toward someone/where else” (Sensual 80). Aligning feminine jouissance with Judith Butler’s notion of a lesbian phallus, Musser’s reading, in my view, runs counter to Lacan’s.

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Omid Bagherli (bio)

Abstract

Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University and a key figure in queer theory. This interview was conducted in December 2022, a month before Edelman’s fourth book, Bad Education, was published by Duke University Press. In this discussion, Edelman revisits the “antisocial” debate in queer theory and assesses his understanding of negativity and antisociality in relation to the positions of Leo Bersani and José Esteban Muñoz, among others. Edelman also outlines how his thought in No Future and Bad Education interacts with contemporary politics and strands of Afropessimism, feminism, and family abolition.

Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University and the author of four books: Transmemberment of Song (1987), Homographesis (1994), No Future (2004), and Bad Education (2022). He has also co-authored Sex, or the Unbearable (2013) with Lauren Berlant. Known for his Lacanian and deconstructive mode of reading and for his continued interest in the negativity of the death drive in cultural and sexual politics, Edelman has been a central figure in the field of queer theory and is often associated with the “antisocial thesis” or “antisocial turn” (even if, as this interview illustrates, he meets these designations with reservations). In addition to his publications, Edelman has served as a series editor for Theory Q, a book series published by Duke University Press, since 2014.

Edelman’s most recent book, Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing, develops the claims from No Future by arguing that queerness, as a surrogate term for what is “radically inassimilable,” is inimical to aesthetic, philosophical, and social orders. In doing so, Bad Education also considers how the term queerness functions much like Blackness or woman in other fields of theory.

Omid Bagherli:

This special issue’s title, Afterlives of the Antisocial, invites a reflection on the philosophical and theoretical legacy of this strand of inquiry within and beyond queer studies. But in order to do that, I’d first like you to provide a reflection on the institutional impact of what has been termed “the antisocial turn.” So, my first question is: what are your recollections and reflections about that time in the academy, around the time of the release of Leo Bersani’s Homos, and later, No Future? Could you provide your own view of how and why the fairly young field of queer theory or studies congealed and divided in the way that it did?

Lee Edelman:

Although queer studies in the early 2000s was still a fairly young field, it had been flourishing by then for about as long as deconstruction in its heyday. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal Between Men, followed by Epistemology of the Closet, had been fully internalized and incorporated by scholars in the field; Hortense Spillers’s essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” had raised crucial questions about the applicability of gender and sexuality with regard to Blackness; Teresa de Lauretis had coined the term queer theory for the 1990 Conference at Santa Cruz; Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble had already had a tremendously vitalizing impact; Diana Fuss’s groundbreaking anthology Inside/Out had been widely read as consolidating a field and Saint Foucault, Homographesis, Homos, Disidentifications and major texts by Gayle Rubin, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, D. A. Miller, Jonathan Goldberg, Deborah McDowell, Michael Warner, Cindy Patton, Douglas Crimp, and Lauren Berlant had shaped lively debates. There were already extensive engagements with Foucault, Wittig, and Hocquenghem, especially after Michael Moon brought out the English translation of Homosexual Desire in 1993. That same year Series Q at Duke began to publish work in queer theory (No Future appeared under its imprimatur) and the institutionalization of the discipline was well under way.

All of which is to say, that by the time of No Future‘s publication, queer theory was in its unruly adolescence. The first Yale sexuality conference—then called “The Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference” and sponsored by the newly formed Lesbian and Gay Studies Center at Yale—took place in 1987 and the quaintness with which that title now strikes us reflects one of the earliest ruptures in the field. Although Lesbian and Gay Studies had entered the academy in the early eighties, it largely directed its attention to sociological, historical, or psychological questions. What de Lauretis called queer theory marked the bifurcation of the discipline into a more identitarian branch (Lesbian and Gay, subsequently followed by Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Studies) and a more avowedly theoretical branch, influenced by deconstruction, feminist theory, and critical race studies. So, by 2004 queer theory constituted a significant body of work and had already achieved institutional recognition at numerous universities and colleges.

But institutionalization entails the production of a normalizing logic; it depends on a reductive interpretation of the emergent field itself to satisfy the academy’s conservative understanding of what knowledge-transmission entails. It was both inevitable, therefore, and necessary that queer theory confront the demands for inclusion by those persons and those intellectual perspectives that seemed excluded from its framing. However fractious those debates may have been, they signaled the vitality of the discipline as a site of contestation, as an arena in which intellectual division was keeping thought alive. Having succeeded in articulating a space to think queerness in a monolithically heteronormative academy, queer theory discovered its own monolithic presumptions had to yield to multiplicity too. That entailed, most visibly, the struggle for recognition of the experiences, histories, and theoretical affordances specific to those outside the subject positions of cisgendered white lesbians and gay men, especially bisexuals, trans persons, and queers of color. But it also entailed divisions, especially in those early years, between activists and theorists (we had been living with the AIDS epidemic for over twenty years when No Future came out and for many in the activist community the theoretical investments of queer theory were seen, as Leo Bersani put it, as a “luxury” they couldn’t afford). Even among those who rejected the antithesis of activism and theory, though, divisions emerged between those whose projects reflected the historicist tenor of the times and those who persisted in traditions of deconstructive or psychoanalytic thought that were seen as even less translatable into socially useful terms.

And that’s where Leo Bersani’s work becomes so significant. Insofar as this issue calls itself “the afterlives of the antisocial,” I assume it must refer, if only secondarily, to Bersani’s death in 2022. The afterlives of the antisocial would constitute, to some degree, the intellectual afterlife of Bersani himself. October published “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in the winter of 1987, the same year I presented “The Plague of Discourse” at the annual MLA convention. Both texts responded to the AIDS epidemic by employing psychoanalytic frameworks to examine the representations of gay men in terms of HIV disease. Bersani’s essay addressed the disavowed seductiveness of ego-dissolution and mine explored the figural logics that disarticulate identities. Those similar intellectual investments led both of us to challenge redemptive logics and so to seem opposed to the work of social remediation.

In 1996, when Bersani published Homos, he explicitly celebrated what he saw as gay desire’s “potentially revolutionary inaptitude … for sociality as we know it” (7). His book affirmed what he called the “gay outlaw” as a manifestation of what he proclaimed as “politically unfixable in the human” (71). At the same time, though, he took issue with my own suggestion that “[t]he value of ‘acts of gay self-nomination’ is … equivalent to their negativizing, self-destructing potential” (69). Bersani insisted on a “gay” specificity, as opposed to my own readings of gay signification as a site of the dominant culture’s figural localization of negativity—and specifically, as “The Plague of Discourse” suggested, as a site of the figural localization of the unknowable, of the Lacanian Real inaccessible to Symbolic meaning. Hence, for all his promotion of homo-ness in opposition to forms of redemption, Bersani could refer to a “curative collapsing of social difference into a radical homo-ness, where the subject might begin again, differentiating itself from itself and thereby reconstructing sociality” (177). In this way, Leo remained attached to gayness as a transformative identity category at odds with my sense of gayness or queerness as a figural depository for the radically inassimilable.

When Robert L. Caserio organized a panel for the 2005 MLA convention on “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” he created a rubric meant to link my work (and especially No Future, which had come out the year before) both with Leo’s and with Jack Halberstam’s, Duke having published In a Queer Time and Place the year after publishing No Future. Bringing Jack, Tim Dean, José Muñoz, and me together for a “conversation,” the panel quickly became a debate about No Future, Lacan, and the importance of hope for social transformation. Antisocial very quickly got reduced to another trope for apolitical in a repetition of earlier debates that shaped the emergence of queer theory. For my part, I never conceived myself as an antisocial critic because my focus was on the social logic that necessitated figures of antisociality. I had no interest in affirming a subject position that would somehow dismantle the social, nor did I assert the possibility of occupying a subject position outside the social. I was interested in how sociality requires the generation of the antisocial, which it generates as figures of antisociality, identities constructed to serve as loci of its own antisocial impulse. The emphasis on the figurality of those figures—on their status as positivizations of the negativity the social then seeks to negate—coincided with an emphasis on the antagonism that sunders sociality itself: the antagonism that reflects an attempt to purge the indeterminacy of its own figural status. The question for me has always been: “What are the forms through which the negativity inherent in the social gets abjected onto categories of otherness in order to establish the fantasy of a coherent and internally consistent social order?” That’s why my focus has always been on questions of language and rhetoric: on the figural constructions that we recurrently misconceive as literal identities. So, to get back to your question about the internal divisions of queer theory, the fundamental division reflected in that panel was between those who wanted to argue for a transformative undoing of the social order to secure a more inclusive future and those who explored, as Bersani had put it, what was “politically unfixable.” Muñoz and Dean were on one side and I was on the other, with Jack, at least as I saw it, having a foot in both of those camps.

OB:

That logic of wanting both seems to be a consistent element in the way that you either critique or appraise other thinkers. In Bad Education, in “Nothing Ventured,” you draw attention to how, as you put it, Catherine Malabou “recoils from the consequences her negativity entails” (13). This happens again, I think, with your brief discussion of how Eric Santner “retreats” from an initial insight into negativity (91). Your work tends to notice a kind of wish to recuperate as a second move in a lot of critical writing.

LE:

None of us can avoid the recuperative impulse; it’s impossible, as Bad Education argues, to follow the path of negativity without encountering the negative’s inevitable reversion to positivity, either as a result of our psychic resistance to it or as the result of the resistance inherent in the referential aspect of language. It’s instructive to see how this played out in the career of Bersani himself. After the publication of Homos, in which, as I’ve been suggesting, the recuperation of sociality was already under way, Leo refocused his critical energies. He went from the critic who vaunted homo-ness as a salutary betrayal of sociality to one who would theorize homo-ness as enabling a social order based on impersonal relationality. Even in Homos, he expressed a wariness of his attraction to the negative, associating the death drive with sadomasochism. Homos could endorse the queer’s refusal to embody the good citizen and “Is the Rectum a Grave?” could celebrate the rectum’s “potential for death,” but Bersani stopped short of accepting that the death drive might have something to do with the figural place that queerness was made to occupy in the social order or that its relation to negativity, the Real, and jouissance might have socio-political consequences for those excluded from the order of meaning. Instead, in his work after Homos, he sought to “play to the side of the death drive,” attempting, in a sense, to recuperate homo-ness for a “socially viable” relationality. His elaborations of homo-ness suppressed the shattering of the subject to focus, instead, on the subject’s inaccurate and impersonal replication in the multiplicity of forms of being it encounters in the world. In this way his earlier meditations on formal repetition, linked with the death drive in The Freudian Body, get reconceived as what he calls, in Forms of Being, a “being-togetherness … [that] assumes the capacity of all objects to be less than what each one is, and therefore to participate … in the community of all being” (171). At the end of his career, however, in Thoughts and Things, he rethought this move and acknowledged the negativity whose force he had resisted, experiencing, as he put it, a “reinvig[oration]” of his “negativizing impulse” (25). The tension between the negative (the psychoanalytic account of the death drive) and the affirmative (the formal relationality he associated with art) found expression near the end of Forms of Being: “To open ourselves to those correspondences [of inaccurate replication] requires a relational discipline capable of yielding an ascetic pleasure that may, at least intermittently, supersede the jouissance of ‘the blindest fury of destructiveness’” (177). The tentativeness of “may” and the oscillation of “intermittently” register the ambivalence with which Bersani confronted the social “destructiveness” of jouissance.

Let me hasten to add that I don’t exempt myself from the resistance to negativity, either. To write about negativity is always to undertake to tame it, to make sense of it, to put it to work, however much one wants to do otherwise. Our thought about negativity is mediated by what Freud calls the secondary process while negativity as such draws its energy from the displacements of the primary process. Hence, we’re always, in our critical work, domesticating it for thought, even in the process of addressing the disruptions of thought that it produces. That’s why, as I argue in Bad Education, we can neither realize negativity nor escape it.

OB:

Another important figure that you’ve just mentioned in the framing and debate of the antisocial turn is José Esteban Muñoz. In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz calls what we’ve been discussing as the antisocial thesis the “antirelational thesis” (11). I think it’s also worth quickly noting that Muñoz swiftly associates the “antirelational” stance with another term of longstanding debate, paranoid reading (borrowed from Sedgwick).

While I think that the connection between these two framings is interesting, I actually wanted to hear more about something you briefly mention in your recent article “On Solidarity.” There, you intimate a turn in Muñoz’s thought toward the “negativizing impulse” that sounds similar to what you say of Bersani. You write that you found The Sense of Brown “so compelling, especially insofar as it elaborated, far more fully than Cruising Utopia, the negativity on which the concept of disidentification rests” (105n12). Could you explain what you mean here, and how you found Muñoz’s later work to be different from his position in Cruising Utopia?

LE:

In the preface to Sex, or the Unbearable Lauren Berlant and I addressed the anxieties produced by widespread misconstructions of the “antisocial thesis.” As we argued there, negativity inheres in any political project or in any analytic of the social opposed to the prevailing logics within which reality can be thought. In Homos, Bersani elaborated the antisociality of what he called the “gay outlaw,” a figure whose salutary association with betrayal refuses “to accept a relation with any given social arrangement” (171). As I just mentioned, however, he simultaneously attempts to redeem what he sees as the gay “inaptitude … for sociality” by reading its negativizing tendency as prelude to “a reinventing of the social” (7, 171). Even in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” when he seems most antagonistic to the notion of redemption—”But what if. … the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it“—Bersani immediately does just that, going on to frame “sexuality … as our primary hygienic practice of nonviolence” (222). Affirmations of redemptive hope, promises of collective reinvention, anticipations of Deleuzian becoming: these subtended all the resistances to the “antisocial thesis.” José Muñoz responded by adducing the imagining of a “then and there,” of a transformative communal possibility that he links to futurity in Cruising Utopia and privileges over the negativity both necessary for, an incompatible with, that possibility’s realization. As this suggests, the opposition to the “antisocial thesis” was, in large part, an opposition to the discourse of negativity even though that negativity was vital to its own political hope: the negativity that insisted on the void in any given social logic and so made possible a resistance to the social order as given. What my own work maintained, to the dismay of some, was the necessary corollary. Insofar as every social order must perpetuate that void—insofar, that is, as the structure of the social requires ontological exclusion, requires the negation of the figure made to embody the antisocial—the problem inheres in the social itself and not in its contingent forms. The antisocial, as Lauren and I put in Sex, or the Unbearable, must be seen “not in any simple antithesis to the social but rather as intrinsic to it” (xiii).

Your focus on the shift in terminology from “antisocial” to “antirelational” gestures toward the superimposition of an adjacent debate about paranoid and reparative criticism onto the responses to the “antisocial thesis” and its focus on negativity. Muñoz, of course, asserts in Cruising Utopia that he doesn’t “want to dismiss the negative tout court.” (12). His “argument,” he declares, “with the celebration of negation in antirelational queer critique is its participation in what can only be seen as a binary logic of opposition” (13). Needless to say, since he’s explicitly responding to No Future here, I find this unpersuasive, especially since that text makes clear that “queer theory’s opposition is precisely to any such logic of opposition” (24). In fact, it’s hard to credit a resistance to binary opposition to someone who embraces “anti-antirelationality.” Nor is the context of that descriptor’s appearance in Cruising Utopia insignificant. Muñoz adduces it to characterize a passage from Eileen Myles’s memoir, Chelsea Girls, about which he says: “I want to suggest that this passage could be seen as representing an anti-antirelationality that is both weirdly reparative and a prime example of the queer utopianism for which I am arguing” (14).

Just prior to this, he explicitly conflates what Caserio called the “antisocial thesis” with what Muñoz now calls the “antirelational thesis,” a rubric he variously associates with “paranoid” criticism, with theories asserting “the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of difference,” and with work refusing “an understanding of queerness as collectivity” (11). That these characterizations may be contradictory (the negativity that denies queerness the coherence of community responds, for example, to the non-singularity of sexuality as a trope of difference) serves largely to underscore that Muñoz’s turn to the trope of “antirelationality” bespeaks first and foremost his (binary and oppositional) investment in the paranoid/reparative debate whose mapping onto the “antisocial thesis” helped to shape the latter’s reception. You’ll never lose money, especially in America, investing in Utopian hopes; but you’ll also always get a healthy return by speculating on paranoia. Perhaps that seeming paradox speaks to the connection between the two—a connection similar to the one obtaining between Muñoz’s antiantirelationality and the negativity it refutes.

That’s what I find so interesting in Muñoz’s final project, a project that he and I discussed the last time that we met. It engages brownness as “here and now” in contrast to his Utopian pursuit of queer futurity’s “then and there.” From the first, with Disidentifications, Muñoz had recognized the negativity—the force, precisely, of dis-identification—necessary for any approach to what a social order excludes. In responding to No Future, though, he misrecognized, from my perspective, what that book shared with his own negativity. In his rejoinder to No Future—”the future is only the stuff of some kids”—he missed the point that the future is not the stuff of any kids; it’s always an ideological fantasy, embodied by the Child and relentlessly imposed on living children (positively or negatively, to aggrandize or to devalue them) to preserve a social logic that does indeed deny certain kids a future, as made clear by No Future‘s reference to the white separatists’ “Fourteen Words,” but that does so in the name of the Child. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the Child, in its function as regulatory ideal, usually (although not always) will assume the salient attributes—including race, ethnicity, and religious persuasion—of the community that deploys it. We see that even in Muñoz’s text when he, at the very moment of characterizing the Child as “always already white,” invokes the pathos of the Child representing communitarian survival precisely on behalf of children of color: “all children are not the privileged white babies to whom contemporary society caters” (94). Rightly identifying “a crisis in afrofuturism,” which is to say, the murderousness of a social order that interprets Blackness as ontological negation, Muñoz, in my view, failed to see that the privileging of the Child, even when conceived as a Child of color, repeats the logic that generates such murderousness in the first place: the logic of conceptualizing the future, and the Child, as a property to be claimed in the service of power relations of the here and now. Without renouncing queer futurity, though, Muñoz opens onto something else in The Sense of Brown, something he seems to acknowledge in writing that “[b]rownness diverges from my definition of queerness” (121). The “here and now” of brownness, that is, comes back to the negativity at the heart of Disidentifications: “Owning the negation that is brownness is owning an understanding of self and group as a problem in relation to a dominant order, a normative national affect” (40). I don’t want to go on too long about this, but I do think that the link between brownness and negation, and, indeed, the “owning [of] negation,” is crucial to its “divergence” from Muñoz’s earlier framing of queer futurity. But what’s constant, and telling, is the focus on affect, or on what he calls “brown feelings” (40). Affective responses to experiences of negation, and their potentially negativizing consequences, offer an important arena for critical exploration and they have produced, as with The Sense of Brown, some rich and remarkable texts. My own work, though, attends to the structures that generate such negations and remains wary of giving feelings any epistemological privilege insofar as they are (over)determined by those same structures too.

OB:

Now, I’d like to consider your work in some more detail. How would you characterize the shift or relation from your work in No Future to Bad Education? It’s very clear that you’re continuing and developing on No Future’s insights, but there’s also a slight adjustment that’s palpable to me, but very hard to articulate. The best way that I can put it now is that Bad Education is shifting away from the study of a kind of recurrent fantasy-scene of the Child, the couple, and the queer or the sinthomosexual, to a stronger focus on queerness as an anti-philosophy. How do you understand the relation between the two book projects?

LE:

The link between the two projects has to do with how philosophy, acknowledged as such or not (and philosophy, for Lacan, shares fundamental precepts with religion) undergirds a given society’s determination of value. As we see in the case of Socrates, philosophy bears crucially on education insofar as it determines the values a culture chooses to transmit. It’s important to remember that Socrates was sentenced to death for two things: for worshipping foreign gods and for corruption of the young—something we all should reflect upon at this moment of politically mobilized panic about sexual knowledge, access to information, and “protecting” the “innocence” of children.

From Plato through Hegel to Alain Badiou, Plato’s major contemporary exponent, the western philosophical tradition opposes the queerness of jouissance, its foreignness to the subject of rational thought. Badiou states this explicitly: “philosophy wants to know nothing about jouissance.” Though he’s also indebted to the thought of Lacan, whom he labels an anti-philosopher, Badiou resists the negativity to which jouissance, in psychoanalysis, is bound, which is to say, the jouissance by which sense or meaning is unbound, as in primary process thought. Philosophy, to be philosophy, to take shape as the love of wisdom or knowledge, must reject the perpetual disruption of knowledge by the Real of jouissance, which functions, in this context, like irony as defined by Friedrich Schlegel: a “permanent parabasis.” Like irony, jouissance continuously interrupts philosophy as mastery. If Lacan is an anti-philosopher, then it’s because he refuses the formalization of knowledge or the establishment of objective principles by which to regulate psychoanalysis. Badiou distinguishes the antiphilosophical imperative of Lacanian psychoanalysis from his own philosophical investments by condensing Lacanian practice into a single statement—”I dissolve” or “I undo”—which he contrasts with the philosophical utterance par excellence: “I found” or “I establish.” Whether by varying the length of the psychoanalytic session, refusing empirical criteria to evaluate the training of psychoanalysts, or recurrently dissolving his schools, Lacan, for Badiou, embodied the cut, the negativity, the interruption that makes psychoanalysis inherently antiphilosophical in its commitment to thinking the subject’s determination by jouissance.

Psychoanalytic and philosophical schools of thought—with their differing thoughts on schooling—thus stand in radical opposition. No Future‘s analysis of the socio-political discourse of the Child led to Bad Education‘s questions about the pedagogical logics by which we manage the Child’s transition into a (re)productive adult. In this sense, I see Bad Education as exploring our anxieties about cultural transmission and the preservation of dominant values, what the book calls “the pedag-archival imperative,” in the face of figures of queerness (xvi). To be honest, it’s a bit unnerving how much No Future and Bad Education speak to our contemporary moment. So many of our current political flash points center on children and education, and especially on the so-called right of parents to “protect” their children, even in public spaces, from anything or anyone that would expose them to realities from which their parents would prefer that they be kept away. The purging of school libraries, the banning of classroom references to queer lives or to histories of racial injustice and white privilege, the incendiary proliferation of discourses of “grooming” all aim at an ideological cleansing of the public sphere of an otherness construed as inherently aggressive or assaultive—as a non-consensual encounter with an otherness, a queerness, seen as imposing on children, regardless of their parents’ will, a knowledge that violates their “innocence.” All of this hews to the template of Vladimir Putin’s promulgation of laws in Russia prohibiting any mention or representation of non-normative sexualities where minors might encounter them—a law that Putin now wants to extend in order to ban what the law describes as “gay propaganda” for people of all ages. Make no mistake: all expressions of queerness are defined as “gay propaganda.” So the inseparability of queerness from determinations of a proper education seems particularly pressing now. At the moment of our conversation, I note the introduction of two bills in the West Virginia legislature that purport to protect minors from obscene materials but include in that definition exposure to or performances by transgender persons. Such a law would make it illegal to be a transgender person in school.

OB:

That certainly illustrates how both texts give insight to today’s situation. It also, I think, emphasizes the connection between the two “anti-s” in our discussion. What the “antiphilosophy” of Lacanian psychoanalysis shares with the (purported) “antisocial turn” within queer studies is a concentrated interest in the negativity of jouissance within the order it studies.

Now, it would be useful to outline how Bad Education directly links its project with other fields of theory that are thinking about the negativity of the social order in similar terms. I wanted to hear more about how, in your account, Afropessimist thinkers theorize Blackness in a loosely analogous way to how you read queerness and also how, both earlier and later than No Future, some feminists think femininity or woman within patriarchy in a comparable way. In Bad Education, you turn to the psychoanalytic concept of sex to bring these fields into conversation. Could you outline how “sex,” as you use it, connects these three fields and their unstable objects of study?

LE:

What truly links these fields for me is that sex, queerness, Blackness, and woman are all signifiers that contest, far more than they specify, their referents. Rather than identifying something known, they open speculation into what and how these signifiers “mean.” Of course, many who work in Black studies, feminism, and queer theory would deny that assertion, just as many in psychoanalysis would resist that understanding of sex. For such persons those terms have fixed referents that serve as the basis for disciplinary practices, usually historical, sociological, diagnostic, or communitarian: practices that have to do with the substantialized identities of “Blacks,” “women,” or “queers” as they experience their being in the world. Notwithstanding the value of that work, it’s not what I pursue. For me, those various signifiers attempt to nominate figures of exclusion from the determining frameworks of meaningfulness or of value. Rather than signifiers, in other words, of ontologically determinate beings, they are figures for what remains outside the horizon of ontology. They are, therefore, as I argue, catachreses: attempts to domesticate the unnameable by giving it a name. They seek, that is, to substantialize the other of meaningful being by locating it in particular beings (“the” Black, “the” woman, “the” queer) who then can be abjected from the social body to effect its consolidation.

This brings us back to your question, “How is sex an operator in this particular category?” The thing to understand here is that sex as a psychoanalytic concept is not a substantive that designates either an empirical condition (as some would understand “male” and “female”) or any putative relation between sexuated subjects. Sex, instead, is the indicator of a cut, a gap, a division that enables the process of sexuation. It is the fundamental division by means of which a world of meaning takes shape. It is not a division that emerges by recognizing a priori differences, by seeing how things “really” are. It’s the division that makes possible the being of things, and the being of the world, in the first place. That’s why a crucial analog for that foundational division is Ferdinand de Saussure’s differentiation of signifiers and signifieds. In the beginning, for psychoanalysis, is not the word but the radical of division of which the word itself is a signifier.

As I put it in Bad Education, one could imagine a mythic origin, then, a genuine creation ex nihilo, in which division initiates being by dividing nothing from itself, producing as the primal difference that between nothing and what splits off from it: the not-nothing whose negated negativity then gets positivized as “something.” Psychoanalysis attends to this constitutive division as it determines the experience of the subject (divided between conscious and unconscious, between the pull of desire and the compulsion of the drive) and as it leads us to fantasies of suture through the sexual relation. Sex, in this way, refers to the incomprehensible negativity of division as well as to the fantasy of positivized entities whose relation might resolve it. Thus “sexual difference,” for Lacan, attempts to master that division. The matching doors to which he refers in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” bear differentiating signifiers, “Hommes” and “Dames,” and that difference attests to the imperative to locate a positive empirical difference to explain the rupture that produces the empirical as we know it. Understanding sex in this way allows us to see that race and sexuality function similarly. They too purport to positivize poles across the divide of a gap. Bad Education argues that all the names used to frame or explain that divide are always catachreses that seek to disavow the intractable negativity of the divide itself.

OB:

Great—this is helpful and allows me to press further into how you’re placing these categories alongside each other. I was hoping that you could expand on your claim, then, that in some sense queerness as a category possesses an almost tactical or political advantage over these other terms in the way that its ambiguity allows it to resist (but not totally) any move to positivize it. Could you outline why queerness is your preferred term over Blackness or woman or transness?

LE:

The virtue of queerness is that it begins as a term of wonder, curiosity, or fear, a term to mark, and eventually to stigmatize, the unfamiliar, alien, or non-normative without being bound to any particular identity. At the outset, there are no fixed attributes to the quality of queerness except its non-conformity to a given order’s customs. Even now, when queer seems synonymous with “non-normative” sexualities, the boundaries of that category are open to debate. Should middle-class cis-gendered gays and lesbians in Western democracies count as “queer” in the age of “marriage equality”? Even the endless proliferation of initials in LGBTQIAA+ reminds us that there are countless unnamed and unrecognized subsets of sexuality. Perhaps there are as many sexualities as subjects—or perhaps there are even more, since it’s not necessarily clear that one subject is confined to one sexuality.

For me, though, the virtue of queerness lies not in its open-ended reference to non-normative sexualities but rather its open-ended reference to non-normative subject positions, thus mobilizing an older sense of queerness as foreign to the logic of community. But “queerness” is not a “privileged” term in the sense that it has some greater truth or purchase over others. “Blackness” and “woman” do similar work as tropes of ontological negation referring to an exclusion from meaning required for the positing of collectivity. That’s not to say that “Blackness” or “woman” is synonymous with queerness, but rather that each of them constitutes what Derrida called a “nonsynonymous substitution.” Each has its own distinct history and each occasions different lived experiences; each bears different consequences for relations to power, privilege, and community. But all of them figure, in particular contexts, the ontological negation through which a social order enacts the antisociality by means of which it undertakes to secure its social coherence.

OB:

This next question follows on from what we’re discussing here. I want to raise this question with some care for obvious historical and political reasons, but I also want to know how your reading of “queerness as foreign to the logic of community” leads you to either directly engage with or skirt topics that many would rather not broach. I’m referring both to the way that you take up incest, on the one hand, and the figure of either the pedophile or the pederast on the other. How do these two topics fit into the way that you are theorizing queerness?

LE:

Well, let’s start with incest. As I describe it in Bad Education—and this directly relates to what “sex” is—incest is the name, the catachresis, by which we identify a fantasy of what preceded the fall into subjectivation and difference. Incest names a fantasy (which, like many fantasies, is anxiogenic as soon as we get too close to it) of returning to the Lacanian Imaginary state, to union with the pre-Oedipal (M)/Other, and so of dissolving our subjectivity, of escaping the burden of in/dividuation. It thus designates a regression from the Father’s law, his prohibition of access to the (M)/Other that installs the subject in the Symbolic; but, crucially, the regression that incest imagines posits a return to the Imaginary from the subject position that return would annihilate. To echo Slavoj Žižek’s cogent remarks, to that extent, the fantasy of incest, strictly speaking, is impossible. This is not to deny that what legal codes statutorily identify as incest takes place, often with horrific violence. But from the psychoanalytic perspective, incest as escape from Symbolic positioning is an unrealizable fantasy for the subject to achieve. We can never return to the moment before our separation from das Ding (the Thing), to the fullness of undifferentiated presence; we only ever conceptualize it as lost. That fullness, after all, is the divided subject’s retroactive construction; there is no subject before the division that produces the Thing as loss. What the law prohibits as incest never gives access to that Thing because the Thing as such is only the loss of the Thing; it has no positive presence. Whatever fantasy legally designated acts of incest may serve to satisfy, they can never, as Žižek reminds us, offer access to the Thing. Quite simply, where the Thing is, we are not. What the law prohibits as incest never eventuates in what incest as psychoanalytic fantasy intends. In Lacan’s words, “ce n’est pas ça.”

In this sense, incest is another name for the opening onto the impossible Real to which queerness and Blackness (among other catachreses) are also assimilated as figures. It signals the collapse of logic, temporality, and narrative by collapsing difference into sameness and thereby precluding articulated meaning. As I note in Bad Education, the category of incest has often been expanded to include both homosexuality and, as Christina Sharpe reminds us, inter-racial sexual unions, which were denounced as amalgamation. In this way incest functions as a trope for the general destitution of meaning by undoing the differential economy that undergirds signification.

If incest, though, like queerness, figures an opening onto the Real, that doesn’t mean that incest is identical to queerness. It functions, instead, like “Blackness” or “woman,” as another nonsynonymous substitution. But this collocation leads us to an important point about queerness. The project of thinking queerness or of elaborating queer theory need not entail the affirmation of everything framed as “queer.” Queer theory, especially in the afterlife (which is really just the ongoingness) of the “antisocial thesis,” differs from the identitarianism of demographic studies insofar as it recognizes queerness as diacritical rather than substantive. Its meaning is always relational; it has no fixed political affiliation, either to the left or the right. From the vantage point of the conservative impulse inherent in a social formation, queerness will always appear as a threat to the conventional order of things. But where the order of things is governed, as in the US after World War II, by a dominant liberal consensus, right-wing populism and fascist resistance can register as queer. It’s not irrelevant, as I argued in a paper about the presidency of Donald Trump, that the recurrent denunciations of his personal and political behavior found expression in a single, outraged assertion to which political pundits returned incessantly: “this is not normal.” Queerness encompasses everything that registers as “not normal.” Queer theory doesn’t ask us to endorse all the subject positions that rubric may include, but rather to interrogate the logics of exclusion and the contradictions in the positing of values by which social orders project their internal antagonism onto subjects who, made to figure that social order’s negativity, can be negated in the hope of getting rid of the antagonism itself. Another way of putting this is to insist once more that queerness should not be construed as a positive category. On the one hand, it’s never stabilized in a positive identity and, on the other, it’s never validated as bearing a positive value. Instead, it challenges every distribution of value, power, and meaning.

The question of pedophilia, then, must present itself to any discourse inquiring into and challenging the logic of normativity. But it’s a question almost impossible to address insofar as it tends more often to function as a signifier of sexual panic than as a signifier of sexual attraction to and/or exploitation of children. In part, that’s because the ideological category of the “child” now encompasses not only adolescents, but often even young adults. At the same time, we see our culture increasingly stigmatizing sexual relations between persons who differ in age by more than a handful of years. And in our eagerness to protect people from the compulsion to “consent” to unwanted sexual encounters, we’ve extended the category of child—that is, of those construed as incapable of giving consent—to all people, regardless of age, insofar as they are defined by certain relations (teacher/student or employer/employee, for example). In this exceedingly moralistic context, any examination of pedophilia—including reflections on its history, its social construction, or its strategic deployment as a reductio ad absurdum of any rejection of sexual norms—gets perniciously conflated with advocacy for or endorsement of it. My own work doesn’t engage pedophilia except to note that the dominant sacralization of the Child is both a spur to, and a reflection of, a fixation on the sexuality of children that gets negatively expressed—through an insistence on children’s “innocence,” which is always excitedly imagined as under threat of violation. Those banning books about same-sex penguins from elementary school libraries are clearly expending a lot of energy seeing children in relation to sex.

Fundamental to much of this panic, of course, is an intensification of resistance to what is still Freud’s most reviled pronouncement: the existence of infantile sexuality. The child’s experience of somatic pleasures at zones (oral, anal, genital) that will be variously invested later in its sexual organization remains, for many—perhaps for most—intolerable to contemplate. Equally intolerable is the recognition, which comes by way of Lacan and Laplanche, that the child’s first encounters with the inherently enigmatic signifiers of sexuality most often come by way of its parents’ unconscious relations to its body. In light of this pervasive disavowal, the idea of thinking children as subject to sexual sensations, or even of thinking children and sex in non-phobic, non-negative perspectives, can register as supporting pedophilia and can seem like an assault, a violation in itself. Like Freud’s theories of child sexuality, though, such thought is not a violation of the child but, rather, of the Child; it violates the fantasmatic purity of the future the Child is made to signify, exposing the Child as a veil behind which parents and the social order alike mask their (inevitable) implication in the eroticization of children. Acknowledging children as sexual rather than treating sexuality as something that adulterates their intensely cathected “innocence” might well diminish the degree to which living children suffer that eroticization as embodiments of the Child.

OB:

That framing, again, of “assault” reminds me of a thought I had when reading the section in Bad Education—when you outline the way deconstruction appeared as a threat for people from a variety of political investments. One of the examples you choose is the journalist Michiko Kakutani, whose attack on deconstruction (and other theoretical approaches, like multiculturalism, feminism, queer theory) you say is instructive. It occurred to me that Kakutani’s The Death of Truth echoes an earlier rejection of theory, this time of Freudian psychoanalysis, in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s 1984 The Assault on Truth. The parallel between the two titles is striking! Masson’s project, as I understand it, is predicated on rejecting the Freudian theory of childhood sexuality and fantasy that you’ve just outlined, and instead alleging that, in founding this now classic theory, Freud effectively denied what he had previously believed: that his patients were assaulted as children. “An act was replaced by an impulse, a deed by a fantasy,” he says. So, for Masson, the truth of The Assault on Truth is that Freudian theory’s focus on impulse and fantasy actively represses/repressed the actual assault of children, who are by implication always innocent of sexuality. The assault on children (perhaps the Child) and Truth are one here, and Freudian thought is guilty of facilitating harms to both. Would you say that’s accurate?

LE:

You’re right that Masson rejected Freud’s argument that children experience sexual fantasy, insisting, instead, that in abandoning the “seduction theory,” Freud was intent on masking the pervasiveness of childhood sexual abuse. It seems to me crucial to recognize, though, that Masson’s focus on the reality of childhood sexual violation and Freud’s focus on the reality of childhood sexual fantasy are by no means incompatible. One does violence to children by conceiving the two as mutually exclusive. But the reduction of sexual fantasy to a mere transcription of literal events suits the purposes of a social order so anxious to “protect” children from sexuality that it eroticizes their “innocence,” as I suggested above, and perversely creates the conditions that make such violation more likely. The point of contact between Kakutani’s and Masson’s defenses of “Truth” is the dangerous insistence on Truth as literal, singular, and universally available. Truth, as our courts of law make clear, is an interpretation or a judgement that takes place within specific frameworks for deciding what counts as evidence. Within the rules of such interpretative games, Truth can be determined. But it requires the specification of those rules, and conformity to evidentiary norms, for Truth to count as Truth.

OB:

That’s extremely clarifying. Finally, since we’ve touched on the ideology and politics of the Child and family, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the term “abolition” and how it intersects with your approach to negativity. The term abolition has been applied in the context of slavery, property, police, and prisons, but there’s also been a recent revival in the last decade or so in calls to abolish the family. There are a number of theorists active in this field, but one in particular, Kathi Weeks, has mentioned your work when providing a general overview of family abolition. What’s most striking, though, is Weeks’s wording towards the end of her article “Abolition of the Family,” where her focus on negativity is close to yours. Following Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, Weeks claims that an abolitionist movement “would put nothing in the place of the family” (16, emphasis added). Could you speak to how your critique of reproductive futurism either relates to family abolitionism or to the idea or process of abolition more generally?

LE:

Well, No Future proposes no blueprint for a better social order. It argues that the problem is not the shape of a particular social order, but the fact of social order itself. While we continuously transform our social orders in response to the internal antagonisms that make them unsustainable, whatever we produce in their stead will reproduce their structuring antagonisms insofar as these are the antagonisms that inhere in the subject of language. I’m sympathetic to the project of challenging the dominance of the family but unable to imagine forms of child-rearing free from what makes family problematic. But if we’re thinking in terms of abolition, I’m especially sympathetic to analyses of children as figures of non-freedom, however much that non-freedom may be, or be thought, in the child’s best interest. The child, after all, has no claim to sovereignty, except in judicially determined situations where, as legal jargon tellingly puts it, the child is “emancipated.” Denied the capacity to give consent, subordinated to the will of its parents with regard to educational and medical decisions, even where its life may be threatened by the parents’ refusal of treatment as a consequence of “deeply held” religious beliefs, the child, who is always enslaved to the Child, needs incisive political attention—and all the more so insofar as the child, as the thorniest figure of non-freedom, is nonetheless subjected to racially-inflected judicial determinations of when, in criminal or disciplinary procedures, it will be treated as an adult. But while I welcome the abolition of the child’s enslavement to the murderous image of the Child, I’m under no illusion that that would be possible. Nor, almost 2500 years after the sentence of death was imposed on Socrates, can I see an end to the moralized panic about the queer corruption of youth. The antagonism relentlessly projected onto such “antisocial” figures springs from the antisociality inherent in the social, which is why the various afterlives of the “antisocial thesis” will continue to play themselves out just as long as social order endures.

Omid Bagherli is a graduate student in English and 2024–25 Dissertation Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. His work focuses on representations of thwarted historical recovery and redress in contemporary literature and film.

Works Cited

• Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. Sex, or the Unbearable. Duke UP, 2014.
• Bersani, Leo. Homos. Harvard UP, 1996.
• –––. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October, vol. 43, 1987, pp. 197–222.
• –––. Thoughts and Things. U of Chicago P, 2015.
• Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. British Film Institute, 2004.
• Edelman, Lee. Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. Duke UP, 2022. Theory Q.
• –––. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004. Series Q.
• –––. “On Solidarity.” Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler, special issue of Representations, edited by Debarati Sanyal, Mario Telò, and Damon Ross Young, vol. 158, no. 1, 2022, pp. 93–105.
• Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU P, 2009.
• –––. The Sense of Brown. Edited by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o, Duke UP, 2020. Perverse Modernities.
• Weeks, Kathi. “Abolition of the Family: The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal.” Feminist Theory, vol. 24, no. 3, 2021, pp. 433–53. Sage Journals.

Sandip K. Luis (bio)

Prakash, Brahma. Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India. Leftword Books, 2023.

Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India (2023), by theater and performance studies scholar Brahma Prakash, came to its readers already winning blurb praises for being “an insightful, and unusual guidebook” (Arundhati Roy), a “work of passion,” and an invitation “to get enraged” (Santhosh Dass). It was presented as a “lyrical and searing … witness to the darkest, but also the most inspiring moments in the history of India” (Nivedita Menon). The numerous reviews of the book, which entered its third edition just a few months after release, were similarly laudatory. Prakash’s extraordinary intellectual feat was received, to quote a reviewer, as a “literary haven, where philosophy and poetry intertwine, where the written word carries us on wings of thought” (Rani).

It is worth emphasizing, however, that this “literary haven,” when originally conceived and taken up by the author, was anything but a place of intellectual retreat. Many of the book’s chapters were written and published during the COVID-19 pandemic in the middle of the lockdown. As Prakash himself admits, quoting an anonymous reader’s observation, “The book is written in a way as though the writer is gasping” (Prakash, “Conversations”). This unique feature, the practice of “visceral thinking” as Prakash puts it (Body 33), makes the book’s overall contents, “the work” in other words, radically unworked—an “inoperative” text so to speak. Its carnal thoughts are expressed in a poetic style that is inevitably broken and elliptical, at times caught inside the infinity mirror of language. Demonstrating Alain Badiou’s axiom of “democratic materialism” that “there are only bodies and languages” (Logics 1), and being deliberately devoid of prescriptions let alone “ideas,” Body on the Barricades is anything but a “guidebook,” contrary to Roy’s estimation.

Yet, there is a guiding motto in Prakash’s elegant and persuasive prose, silently undercutting the overarching and gloomy theme of curtailment experienced under a myriad of repressive conditions. That motto, which I express as a Beckettian dictum (Badiou, Logics 89), is simply to “Go on!”, to continue fighting every form of cordon sanitaire. Anchored on this single maxim, which is the point de capiton of an otherwise nebulous text, Prakash undertakes a daunting project that is at once poetic and philosophical. To fully appreciate the author’s efforts, one needs to start from the very tensions and contradictions to which Prakash subjects himself for the reasons specific to his writing.¹

The Poetic Prose and Its Split Subject

Despite Prakash’s claim of following the “methodology of heart,” a methodology of non-method in other words, it is possible to place Body on the Barricades in the line of the disciplinary innovation of lyrical sociology (Abbott). Against the teleological narrativity of historical disciplines and positivistic descriptivism of conventional sociology, advocates of the lyrical turn in the social sciences endorse the writer’s reflective, sympathetic, and affectively intense engagement in the here and now of the subject. For all its lyricism, however, Body on Barricades complicates the methodological assumptions underpinning the lyrical turn, not just because of its excessive resort to poetic metaphors and philosophical contemplations but also due to an ironic desire for the narrative that it often expresses. This commitment, torn between the lyric and narrative—or the epic to be precise—produces an intriguing split subject in the text. One may outline Prakash’s necessarily unstructured and stylistically fragmented writing through the following questions: Who is the subject of the book’s poetic prose? Is it a body politic of the common masses that surpasses every logic of confinement in the most epic sense? Or, is it the author himself, a confessional subject expressing his feelings in the lyric mode and seeking, as we will see below, an intimate friendship with the reader? Or, should it be assumed, following the Lacanians, that the actual subject is located nowhere other than this split—between the epic and the lyric, the radical exteriority of the masses and the contemplative interiority of the individual?²

The major historical episodes that inspire many of the observations in Body on the Barricades are the Black Lives Matter movement following the custodial killing of George Floyd (Chapter 1), the mass exodus of migrant workers from Indian cities triggered by COVID-19 restrictions (Chapter 4), the farmers’ protest against the extractive agricultural policies of the Indian government (Chapter 6), and the widely discussed Shaheen Bagh protests led by Muslim women against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act passed by the parliament of India (though this is not a main topic in the book)—all happening amidst the pandemic and a ruthless lockdown. Reflecting on them and inspired by Bertolt Brecht, Prakash writes, “I believe epic tragedies and violence have to have an epic writing response; they cannot be captured merely by stating facts and information” (21). This is where the author forges a mimetic relationship with the other (the masses), hoping to constitute the epic subject called “the people” by transcending not just a barricaded society but also the limits of lyrical interiority. For instance, in Chapter 6, “March of the Mustard,” romantic and contemplative motifs of nature, a conventional theme of lyrical poetry, are fused with a description of the “heroic” agency of the Indian farmers (142–43). But the chapter also highlights their inability to produce a narrative (let alone being the heroes of the narrative as we shall see in a while): “You won on the ground but lacked the narrative. … And a successful protest failed in the narrative” (148).

This sense of ultimate failure and loss leads Prakash to the seventh and eighth chapters, “A Siege Against the Siege” and “A Show for the Dead.” Whereas the former, dedicated to the 2016 Una protests against mob lynching and manual scavenging,³ is on a spontaneous gesture and interruptive moment of refusal, “a bare minimum protest … that is not marked by movements but by pauses and breaks” (157, 164), the latter is “about owning death” (199). In this final chapter, addressing a few extreme yet increasingly normal instances, such as the government’s confidential and forced cremation of a Dalit rape victim in the village of Hathras and the open graves in India-occupied-Kashmir, Prakash puts forward his final and perhaps most forceful observation. A disrupted ritual of mourning is not just an occasion for melancholic withdrawal but also a Brechtian instance of the “alienation effect” (Verfremdungseffekt) in which the subject is provided with a unique opportunity to see and seize the necropolitics of power.

The “body on the barricades,” in its ultimate sense, is also a body politic constituted by an ethic of maitri, “the feeling of fellowship” (29). Prakash book, setting out its investigations with an interior monologue from the late Hindi modernist poet Muktibodh’s In the Dark (44–45), is an invitation to create an epic narrative—however tragic or extrapolated it may be in its direction—out of a lyrical subject’s intimate world of love and fellowship. Similar to Muktibodh’s long narrative poem that at times approaches the prosaic, Prakash’s writing attempts to situate itself between genres, suspending conventional literary taxonomies.

Nevertheless, the subject of Prakash’s poetic prose remains split, divided between the irreconcilable differences internal to its composition. What makes Prakash’s meditations truthful to their historical context yet unable to be fully committed to the truth of historical events, is that methodologically and stylistically it is not the epic figuration of the people but the affective interiority of the lyrical subject itself from which the writing ultimately derives its strength. Responding to an interviewer’s question about the parallels between Prakash’s prose and “the lyrical essays propounded by the writers like Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, and others,” he says:

Sharing a similar social background, I read myself between these lines. Yet, there is a pressing need to address the paradoxical place of the lyric in the prose of the contemporary everyday. Even Theodor Adorno, perhaps the foremost advocate of the lyric in the age of late capitalism, famously admitted its “barbaric” incongruity following the genocidal violence of the Second World War and the penetration of the cultural industry into every aspect of individual life (358). It is the experience of this impossibility (of writing lyric poetry) that, ironically, became the last justification for making the same possible today. An assumption of the lyrical self as the centre or the origin of the writing, even if it is cast in the mould of an identity (be it minoritarian or majoritarian), still needs to justify itself by “going out of the self.” What is commendable about Prakash’s intervention is that such an “outside” is sought not so much in any postmodern politics of difference or the social history of identity as in a profoundly anachronistic category of the epic that late modern writers and theorists including Adorno rarely address. What is latent in Adorno’s theory of the lyric, “the collective undercurrent” as he calls it, takes an explicit figuration in Prakash (66). Against Adorno’s left-liberal melancholia and the criticism of the “naivety” of the epic, be it classical, modern, or Brechtian, (49), Prakash ponders the possibility of an epic plot to affirm and narrativize the new figure of our historical present: the people or the collective.

However, in a candid and self-reflective move, Prakash also admits the stakes and contradictions involved in his daunting project of writing the epic from a lyrical point of view. No matter how epic and heroic the composition of the multitude is, the confusion around its amorphous character, sliding between the extremes of being a murderous mob and a noble expression of shared humanity and fellowship, is repeatedly expressed following the global populist wave in the past decade. Though Body on the Barricades does not squarely address this crucial question of political theory other than remaining troubled by it, the real tension in its prose comes from a different source: the social location of the author’s lyrical subjectivity, the actual place from which he speaks. Prakash’s anecdotes begin with an honest admission of the hypocrisy and paranoia of a middle-class individual to whom many readers, including this reviewer, would immediately relate: “I felt exposed. Good that he [Kishor, a sanitation worker who decided to get married amidst the pandemic] did not say, ‘Sir, your mask is falling down’” (14). Later in Chapter 3, the most moving and personal section of the book, Prakash not only recounts his family’s difficult relationship with Muslims in a communally polarized Bihari village, but also confesses his own susceptibility to the surrounding culture of hatred: “I could have been part of a lynch mob like many others if I would not have been sensitized against hate” (80). Admissions such as this should send shivers down the reader’s spine. Hasn’t this self-exposure, the truth about one’s untruthfulness, seriously compromised the reliability of the contract/maitri that the writer sought to establish with his readers?

The Poet-Ruler, Obscure Events

Prakash engages with the problem of poetic demagoguery, especially with respect to the appropriation of the sixteenth-century anti-caste poet-saint Kabir by the present Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is not only a fascist but also a mediocre poet, following the lead of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first prime minister from the same political party). As Chapter 2 only flags this question towards the end, it receives more dedicated attention in Chapter 5, “The Trial of Art.” Acknowledging that being a poet (or artist) alone is not sufficient—since we also have “darbari (state patronized) poets, poet bureaucrats, and poet corporates, the poet who participated in the riots, and the poet who became the prime minister” (124)—Prakash invites the reader to the most self-reflective chapter of the book. This is where the writer of poetic prose reflects on the very status and meaning of his vocation at a time of increasing censorship and the instrumentalization of language for state propaganda. Finally, the chapter is also the erratic point where the overall arguments of Body on the Barricades, premised on the “power of words [and images],” ironically appear to be the most vulnerable, not just because of the topic of artists and intellectuals put behind bars, but also because of the fundamental bad faith Prakash continues to hold regarding the role of art and literature. Prakash, following in the footsteps of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, writes: “A state is ‘conservative by its very nature as a State’… [A]rt is revolutionary by its very nature as art. … The poet and the state are in a ceaseless fight [since] the relationship between art and the state is a case of ontological antagonism” (130; my emphasis). In Ngũgĩ emphatic opposition between the two takes the following form: “Absolute art is for the celebration of absolute motion, which is life: the absolute state is for the absolute cessation of motion, which is death” (14). The importance of this statement for a book about the necropolitics of confinement is perfectly understandable.

Such assumptions about the ontological distinctiveness of art and the state, or of authorial creativity and authoritarian repression, conceal their secret isomorphism. Since a detailed elucidation of this problem exceeds the scope of this review, let me highlight an aspect that Prakash also evokes in the beginning of his meditations but chooses to leave behind. It is the damning figure of the poet-ruler (parallels to which Ngũgĩ finds in Sédar Senghor and Agostinho Neto). Prakash finds a genealogical origin of this figure in a redundant, and now historically obsolete, strain of anti-Platonism.⁴ Based on Ngũgĩ’s criticism of Plato’s notion of the “philosopher king,” Prakash argues that “poets cannot accept the power of morality and the certainty of truth.” “While the state wants to define everything,” he writes, “for poets and artists, nothing is fixed. It is not surprising that Plato wanted to banish poets from the Republic” (129). Prakash castigates the dictator for his preference for monologue over dialogue (a jibe in Chapter 2 at Modi who is known for evading unscripted interviews). However, it is precisely on the same ground that Plato the poet-ruler argues for the banishment of poets on the charge of their evasion of dialectics and dianoia (discursivity). What makes writing the lyric barbaric during authoritarianism is not so much its resignation to individual interiority as the authoritarian core of the poet’s authorial imagination. At first reading, Prakash’s lyric subject, with all its vulnerability and subjection to the contradictory pulls of class politics and genre classifications, appears to be anything but authoritarian. Owing to the paradoxical authority of the petty bourgeois author as well as his poetic prose, the subject exists only to the extent of erasing itself. However, by privileging the event of language and its poetic constitution, is not the author falling prey to what Badiou has called the descent “into the night of non-exposition” (Logics 59)—an obscuration of the actual political events to which Body on the Barricades seeks to remain faithful? An adventure of thought moving from spectacular protest movements (Chapter 6) to their bare minimum in strike (Chapter 7) and finally regressing to a melancholic resignation to and lyrical immersion in the emptiness of being and the obscurity of death (Chapter 8), still parallels and even overlaps with the state’s negative portrayal (Darstellung) of the political event as nothing. The real wager of an authentic political subject, on the other hand, is to resist every attempt at reducing the event into a mere void in the order of being. The subject achieves this not by picturing the event as a place “to own death,” to quote the author, but by militantly affirming the same as the irradiating provenance of the eternal—”a glorious thing made up of stardust” in Rohith Vemula’s moving words (Doshi), or “becoming the Immortal that [man] is” as Badiou puts it (Ethics 76).⁵

A Comic Desire for the Epic?

“They protested. They were emboldened. They thought that they would emerge as heroes… They remembered the slogan but forgot the song that the revolution will not be televised.”

—Prakash (Bodies 147)

In literary history, the world of immortals is the epic. However, in contemporary cynical reason, the epic, even when it is tragic, is seen as nothing but a farce. We have seen the split subjectivity in Brahma Prakash’s poetic prose, which develops from lyric poetry’s ambivalent desire for epic narrative. I doubt that the force of writing that Prakash finds in lyrical interiority is adequate for this daunting task. Even if we assume, contrary to Prakash, that such a force should rather come from a drive towards the immortal and the singular deeds that bestow the epic protagonists their enduring glory, we should also reckon with the fact that the real antagonist that the writer confronts is the absolute sovereignty of the comic. Let me explain.

For all its anti-authoritarianism, Body on the Barricades refrains from laughing at authority, especially in the first person. Despite the two instances where Prakash cites the irony of the National Investigative Agency of India’s painstaking translation of the satiric songs about the Prime Minister in their charge sheet (118) and the biting sense of humor of the Una protesters in asking the cow-worshipers to do the last rites for their dead “mothers” (179), or the one or two occasions of the author’s self-ridicule (14, 165), the book’s overall tone is sad and somber. In fact, it ends with an enigmatic Epilogue by alluding to the retirement of the comic mode from history. Referring to the late modernist playwright Habib Tanvir’s preference for Greek comedies and his statement, “I want a dictator, so I can continue with my theatre,” Prakash considers what happens to theatre, especially comic theatre, under the real conditions of dictatorship (203): “With his cigar, the narrator [Tanvir] makes an exit, smiling and cracking jokes about the authority” (203). The octogenarian’s exit is provoked by the crisis of comedy as a particular genre, as it now needs to compete with a reality which is thoroughly comic—a state of affairs that is ironic, cynical, and absurdist to its core. In the resultant vacuum left by the withdrawal of the comic playwright, the lyric subject (the author) enters the stage of history, singing his longing for the epic. It is quite easy and tempting to interrupt this new entrant with a burst of contagious laughter, by joining the retired narrator (Tanvir) who is now part of the audience. However, Prakash is singularly positioned to complete the act for an important reason.

Adorno seems to recognize and appreciate the lyric’s ability to redeem the premodern genre of epic, or at least the folk song (Volkslied), during late capitalism. It needs to be noted that Prakash’s previous publication, Cultural Labour: Conceptualising the Folk Performance in India (2019), was primarily on folk traditions and subaltern epics, references to which appear at crucial points of Body on the Barricades (for instance the Bihari love epic Reshma-Chuharmal at the end of the Epilogue). If his lyrical regression is indeed an attempt to rediscover and reintroduce the epic to break down the barriers of stagnated history, then what we are witnessing here is nothing less than a true event in thinking. Just as a body on the barricade could also be a crouching body gathering itself before hurling forth, lyricality could be a muscular contraction of thinking before lunging into the future.

Sandip K. Luis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History & Art Appreciation at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He teaches critical theory and historiography, focusing on modernism and global contemporary art. Luis received a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has taught at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi, and the University of Kerala. His areas of research and publication include the theories of the avant-garde, biennials, and historiography of contemporary art.

Footnotes

1. For a short yet illuminative take on Prakash’s paradoxical vision, see Sawhney.

2. For the purposes of this review, I largely follow the definition of the genre provided by Jonathan Culler: “If narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now—in the reader’s engagement with each line” (202). Hegel’s Romanticist theorization of lyric as subjective and epic as objective (or communal), mediated through Adorno’s redefinition of the same, is also crucial to the observations shared here.

3. The Una strike and the related mass movements took place in Gujarat, the home state of the Indian Prime Minister. The strike was a militant response of Dalits (untouchable castes) to the widely mediatized incident of publicly flogging seven members of a Dalit family doing sanitation work by Hindu “cow protection groups.”

4. For a criticism of contemporary anti-Plantonism, see Badiou, “Plato.”

5. Vemula was a Dalit research scholar at the University of Hyderabad and a leading member of Ambedkar Students’ Association in India. Following the repeated persecution and caste discrimination that he faced from the university administration and the Ministry of Education, Vemula took his life in 2016, at the age of 26. Described as an “institutional murder,” the incident triggered widespread protests across India.

Works Cited

• Abbott, Andrew. “Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology.” Sociological Theory, vol. 25, no. 1., 2007, pp. 67-99.
• Adorno, Theodor W. Notes to Literature. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson, Columbia UP, 1992.
• Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward, Verso 2001.
• –––. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2. Translated by Alberto Toscano, Continuum, 2009.
• –––. “Plato, Our Dear Plato!” Angelaki, vol. 11, no. 3, 2006, pp. 39-41
• Culler, Jonathan. “Why Lyric?” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 1, 2008, pp. 201-206.
• Doshi, Vidhi. “India’s caste system: ‘They are Trying to Erase Dalit History. This is a Martyrdom, a Sacrifice.’” The Guardian, 24 Jan. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/24/student-suicide-untouchables-stuggle-for-justice-india.
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Toward a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa. Oxford UP, 1998.
• Prakash, Brahma. “Conversations: Body on the Barricades is a Book of Hope Amidst Curtailment of Rights and Freedom.” Interview by K. Kalyani, Indian Cultural Forum, 2 Sept. 2023, https://indianculturalforum.in/2023/09/02/body-on-the-barricades-is-a-book-of-hope-amidst-curtailment-of-rights-and-freedom/.
• Rani, Chanda. “Book Review, Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India by Brahma Prakash.” Feminism in India, 19 June 2023, https://feminisminindia.com/2023/06/19/book-review-body-on-the-barricades-life-art-and-resistance-in-contemporary-india-by-brahma-prakash/.
• Sawhney, Simona. “Caste and the Resistance of Theatre.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 58, no. 48, 2 Dec. 2023, p. 34, https://www.epw.in/journal/2023/48/book-reviews/caste-and-resistance-theatre.html.

Tim Dean (bio)

Abstract

This Afterword takes stock of the antisocial thesis by reconsidering the significance of Jean Laplanche’s influence on Leo Bersani’s work. Emphasizing the distinctness of Laplanche’s theory of sexuality, the essay differentiates among four positions in the antisocial thesis debate: Bersani’s, Lee Edelman’s, José Muñoz’s, and Dean’s own. Contending that the death drive does not exist as such, Dean argues that negation involves more than negativity and therefore should be understood not merely as destructive but also as creative. Discriminating among claims that have tended to become conflated, the essay connects Bersani’s version of the antisocial thesis to his account of aesthetic subjectivity.

Reflecting on the antisocial thesis nearly two decades after the infamous MLA panel that baptized it, one cannot but be struck by the semantic elasticity of antisocial and the inordinate rhetorical labor this term has been called upon to perform.¹ Here and elsewhere, antisocial has been glossed as “antirelational” and “counternormative”; as “irreparable,” “impossible,” and “deplorable”; as “the impersonal,” “the inhuman,” and “the incongruous”; as “a principle of destructiveness,” as “negativity,” or as “the death drive”; and as “the sexual” in a specifically Laplanchean sense. Its multivalence raises the question of whether antisocial has become by now an empty signifier. No doubt the longevity of the antisocial thesis in queer theory derives from its diagnostic value for the discipline, the way in which it serves as a Rorschach test. Tell me what you think the antisocial thesis means and I will tell you what kind of queer you are—and where you belong in the hierarchy of political radicalism on which the discipline stakes its faith. From a Foucauldian perspective, the antisocial thesis functions as a disciplinary mechanism of classification and control by producing intellectual identities. The fact that “nobody, it seems, wants to be called a theorist of the antisocial” (Svedjan) testifies to the mechanism’s efficacy. In its brazen implausibility, the antisocial thesis provokes us to define ourselves against it. Happily, the essays assembled for this special issue of Postmodern Culture suggest enough time may have passed that we can see beyond the provocation.

I. A Provisional Withdrawal

It has been thirty years since Leo Bersani claimed that “inherent in gay desire is a revolutionary inaptitude for heteroized sociality.” To which he added, “[t]his of course means sociality as we know it, and the most politically disruptive aspect of the homo-ness I will be exploring in gay desire is a redefinition of sociality so radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself” (Homos 7). The blanket terms in which Bersani couched his claims—”sociality as we know it,” “relationality itself”—enabled Homos to be tagged as the inaugural statement of the antisocial thesis (Caserio 819). It was antisocial in the sense that Homos rejected “heteroized sociality” in toto, aspiring not merely to reform social relations by making them more equitable, for example, but to reinvent them from the ground up. His aspiration toward the wholescale reinvention of relations does not make Bersani a utopian thinker (or even an “ambivalent utopian”), since the discourse of utopianism derives from a Marxian intellectual tradition that held little interest for him. We all long for a better world; we are all impatient with the status quo; but there is more to utopianism than that. Although he never put it in quite this way, Bersani regarded utopianism as too complicit with the culture of redemption to be worth pursuing.²

Instead, for the project of rethinking “sociality as we know it,” Bersani was inspired by Foucault’s concern with “new relational modes” (Foucault, “Social” 160). In later volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault explored how ancient practices of “care of the self,” while far from offering a blueprint, evoke a completely different picture of interpersonal and social relations (Foucault, Care). One’s relation to oneself, predicating one’s relation to others, could be understood on an aesthetic rather than a psychological basis. It is worth noting that both Bersani and Foucault were trying to rethink relationality through aesthetics—and that they were working with quite different conceptions of aesthetics than the modern one we inherit from Enlightenment Europe.³ Bersani would redefine sociality not by demystifying literary representations of inequitable social organization, as in the standard critical approach, but by diagramming unexpected formal relationships in visual and verbal art. Those formal relationships, typically virtual yet nonetheless discernible, evoked for him the unrealized potential of a much broader field of relationality. Bersani’s distinctive approach to aesthetics is variously exemplified in the special-issue contributions by John Paul Ricco, Tom Roach, and Mikko Tuhkanen.

If, according to the sentences quoted above, Bersani’s version of an antisocial thesis rejects “heteroized sociality,” then the reader may reasonably wonder whether this phrase is simply a synonym for heteronormativity. In fact, it is not. To put things schematically, Bersani was influenced more by the “late Foucault” (the theorist of aesthetic subjectivity) than by the “disciplinary Foucault” (the theorist of normalization). This goes some way toward explaining why the queer critique of heteronormativity that Michael Warner derived from Foucault’s reading of The Normal and the Pathological turned out to be a target in Homos, rather than a resource.⁴ For Bersani, political critiques of normalization never went far enough; moreover, he found them to be desexualizing. Given how Foucault’s work has served as a primary inspiration for queer theory, it helps to bear in mind that the antisocial thesis represents a departure from Foucault. This circumstance has left the antisocial thesis vulnerable to charges that it tacitly reinscribes the repressive hypothesis, which Foucault laid to rest so long ago (Foucault, History 17-35).⁵

Sidestepping these issues, Bersani developed his critique of “heteroized sociality” via the lesbian feminist philosophy of Monique Wittig. Against the grain of leftwing thought, Wittig articulates a thoroughgoing skepticism toward the very idea of difference: “The concept of difference has nothing ontological about it,” she insists. “It is only the way that the masters interpret a historical situation of domination. The function of difference is to mask at every level the conflicts of interest, including ideological ones” (Wittig 29). Bersani summarizes her claims by underscoring that “the straight mind valorizes difference” (Homos 39). It is because “heteroized sociality” is predicated on difference that he proposes sameness (or homo-ness) as a means for reconceiving relationality from the ground up. This is, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, a sameness without identity—a sameness that exists to the side of our governing social logics of identity and difference (Dean, “Sameness”). When queer feminist scholars, critiquing what they take to be the antisocial thesis, lament that Bersani’s “erasure of difference as the only available means for touching sociality comes dangerously close to advocating a color-blind, gender-blind, difference-blind future” (Rodríguez 10), we need to remember a couple of things. First, that Bersani’s aspiration for something like a “difference-blind future” derives at least in part from lesbian feminist philosophy; second, that reducing the principled critique of difference to a conservative rhetoric of color-blindness suggests a refusal to engage it, a cheap dismissal. What’s radical about Wittig and Bersani—radical in the sense of going to the root—is their conviction that political investments in categories of difference, far from only advancing social justice, severely limit the scope of change.⁶ Their critique of “heteroized sociality” remains distinct, in subtle yet significant ways, from by now familiar critiques of heteronormativity.

Homos thus objected at once to “heteroized sociality” and to what were becoming the hegemonic terms of first-wave queer theory. At the heart of Bersani’s critique lay the matter of sex; he was irritated by queer scholarship’s tendency to skirt, idealize, or otherwise euphemize the nitty-gritties of sex. “You would never know, from most of the works I discuss,” he complained, “that gay men, for all their diversity, share a strong sexual interest in other human beings anatomically identifiable as male” (Homos 5-6). It was from this “strong sexual interest” that he would extrapolate a “revolutionary inaptitude for heteroized sociality” that might be parlayed into genuinely new forms of relationality. What José Muñoz missed in Homos, when he claimed it inaugurated an “antirelational thesis” that his queer utopianism would displace (Cruising 11), was Bersani’s emphasis on “a provisional withdrawal from relationality.” Muñoz conflated the antisocial with an “antirelational” thesis of his own invention by designating as permanent what Bersani viewed as temporary and provisional. The slippage has generated remarkable confusion ever since.

Bersani used the antisocial—that “revolutionary inaptitude for heteroized sociality”—as a springboard for conceiving new relational modes; paradoxically his relational imagination required detours through the nonrelational. He located the nonrelational moment in sex, specifically, those moments of exceptional intensity when erotic stimuli threaten to overwhelm the subject, and sexual pleasure becomes barely distinguishable from pain. Like Freud and Foucault before him, Bersani kept returning to the hard problem of pleasure. Sexual pleasure turns out to confound straightforward intelligibility because it confounds the human body as a totalized form.⁷ In my view, the antisocial thesis remains opaque until one focuses on sex and, specifically, the counterintuitive role of pleasure in Bersani’s understanding of the sexual.

Emerging from a complex psychoanalytic argument developed long before Homos, the key term in Bersani’s account is shattering, since that encapsulates the nonrelational moment. As he put it in “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” summarizing his earlier reading of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,

on the one hand Freud outlines a normative sexual development that finds its natural goal in the post-Oedipal, genitally centered desire for someone of the opposite sex, while on the other hand he suggests not only the irrelevance of the object in sexuality but also, and even more radically, a shattering of the psychic structures themselves that are the precondition for the very establishment of a relation to others.

(217)

The counternormative strand of Freud’s theory of sexuality is thus also potentially counterrelational, insofar as pleasure bears within it an unnerving capacity to disrupt “the psychic structures … that are the precondition for … a relation to others” in the first place. The paradox of sex, in this account, is that it brings people together only to momentarily divide them via self-shattering intensities. Just as escalating pleasure can generate pain, so too can intensifying closeness abruptly yield distance.⁸ Sex evokes ambivalence in part because it offers a means of not only establishing relations but also undoing them.

Do we need to spell out why acknowledging this nonrelational potential in sex fails to make Bersani a prophet of the “antirelational”? In light of Homos, I would emphasize that the psychic experience of shattering is not specific to homo sex; it also remains irreducible to the physiology of orgasm or ejaculation. Too many critics have misconstrued the psychoanalytic concept of shattering as for-gay-men-only, as if it were the outcome primarily of receptive anal sex or somehow connected with social privilege. What non-normative forms of sex sometimes make especially evident is how psychic shattering can occur without orgasm—for example, in BDSM. The intensification of pleasure in corporeal practices grouped under the rubric of BDSM regularly aims at something other than ejaculatory release. In fact, BDSM helps us to glimpse how intensifying pleasure may bear a range of possibilities, none of which need be scripted in advance. Although BDSM encounters require often elaborate forms of consent, no degree of stipulation can eliminate unpredictability or the potential for erotic surprise. The surprise may come from pushing toward something other than orgasm. Bersani’s critique of sadomasochism in Homos is, for me, the weakest part of his book, even as I share his reservations concerning hyperbolic claims made on behalf of BDSM’s political radicalism.⁹ The point of critical commentary should not be to identify and promote sexual practices based on their perceived politics, but rather to grasp what in sex resists every effort at instrumentalization. And this is where the theory of shattering remains relevant, no matter how glibly dismissed it may be today.

II. The Death Drive Does Not Exist

Bersani develops his account of sexuality from Laplanche’s reading of Freud, rather than from Lacan’s. Shattering, a translation of ébranlement, is a specifically Laplanchean coinage.¹⁰ The shattering of the subject differs from the splitting (Spaltung) that, in the Lacanian paradigm, founds the subject; it was this notion of the split subject that Bersani persistently questioned. Debates in queer theory have become confused by how Lee Edelman’s iteration of the antisocial thesis, while pledging allegiance to Bersani, in fact derives from a Manichean version of Lacan. This has allowed the significance of Laplanche to recede from view and has made the distinctiveness of Bersani’s contribution harder to appreciate. The distaste expressed in Homos for psychoanalytic axioms concerning lack and castration suggests that Bersani’s understanding of desire owed more to Deleuze than to Lacan (whereas Edelman wants nothing to do with Deleuze). Forgotten debates among Parisian psychoanalysts and philosophers are far from irrelevant here; it is more than a question of the narcissism of minor differences. Bersani’s and Edelman’s conceptions of sexuality are further apart than many commentators on the antisocial thesis debate appear to grasp.

The penchant for turning Bersani into a Lacanian, when expounding the antisocial thesis, troubles Bobby Benedicto’s otherwise superb contribution to this special issue. From a queer-of-color perspective, he shows how Muñoz’s repudiation of Bersani misfires and, moreover, how “in order to address the violence that accrues under the sign of ‘race’ it is necessary that we retain—against the reparative imperative to seek ‘something like a whole’—an account of negativity as the lack of being that is both universal and irreparable.” Building on groundbreaking psychoanalytic studies of race by David Marriott and Antonio Viego, among others, Benedicto demonstrates Bersani’s relevance only by picturing him as a crypto-Lacanian. While much is gained here—including a welcome demystification of the reparative claims routinely trumpeted by queer-of-color critique—something also gets lost. Having tried, in my own early work, to square Bersani’s brilliant formulations with Lacanian psychoanalysis, I have reached the conclusion that it cannot be done without distorting concepts and misrepresenting intellectual genealogies to the point of incoherence (Dean, Beyond).¹¹

Struck by the paucity of reference to Laplanche in the special issue, I want to outline why his thinking was crucial for Bersani and, indeed, why it matters for the afterlives of the antisocial thesis. This is a matter not of choosing one proper name over another, much less of swearing fealty to one psychoanalytic tradition over another, but rather of delineating the specificity of particular concepts in order to measure what they can—and cannot—accomplish. Laplanche locates sexuality at the heart of psychoanalysis in a way that explains why the sexual can never be analogous to axes of social difference such as gender, race, nationality, or class. Putting the matter this baldly may raise eyebrows, given that an insistence on the specificity of the sexual was precisely what Muñoz objected to from the outset. “I have long believed that the antirelational turn in queer studies was primarily a reaction to critical approaches that argued for the relational and contingent nature of sexuality,” he declares. “Escaping or denouncing relationality first and foremost distances queerness from what some theorists seem to think of as contamination by race, gender, or other particularities that taint the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of difference.” Throwing down the gauntlet, Muñoz continues, “I have been of the opinion that antirelational approaches to queer theory were wishful thinking, investments in deferring dreams of difference. It has been clear to many of us, for quite a while now, that the antirelational in queer studies was the gay white man’s last stand” (“Thinking” 825). Benedicto’s contribution does a fabulous job, from a queer-of-color Lacanian perspective, at showing where Muñoz goes wrong. From a more Laplanchean perspective, I want to suggest why insisting on the specificity of the sexual entails grasping it as something other than a “trope of difference.”

When sexuality is understood as an axis of social difference or a discursive trope, we have no difficulty in treating it like gender and race, whether through intersectionality or some other paradigm. And, indeed, when sexuality is characterized as primarily or exclusively discursive, it becomes as amenable to deconstruction as anything else. But, for Laplanche, the sexual is neither social nor discursive—even though it is constituted relationally and contingently (to use Muñoz’s terms).¹² In his psychoanalytic account, the sexual, though neither properly social nor discursive, is also never predetermined or innate; hence Laplanche’s appeal for a range of queer thinkers, including Gila Ashtor, Jonathan Dollimore, Teresa de Lauretis, John Fletcher, Ann Pellegrini, and Avgi Saketopoulou, in addition to Bersani. By claiming that Laplanche conceptualizes the sexual as something other than a trope of difference, I am not suggesting he thinks it as sameness. Thinking the sexual as a trope of difference, one that could be linked to differences of gender and race, would be for Laplanche already a binding (and thus a betrayal) of the polymorphously perverse phenomenon unearthed by Freud. In that respect, “difference” remains an engine of normalization, a way of smoothing over the difficulty of the sexual.¹³ Muñoz’s “dreams of difference” are precisely what repress the sexual in this Laplanchean sense; those dreams may need to be interpreted for what they occlude. We might say that Muñoz dreams of utopia to avoid confronting the real perversity of sex, its resistance to demographic intelligibility; whereas Laplanche keeps trying to magnify that resistance.

“‘Enlarged’ sexuality is the great psychoanalytic discovery,” Laplanche insists, “maintained from beginning to end and difficult to conceptualize—as Freud himself shows. … It is infantile, certainly, more closely connected to fantasy than to the object, and is thus auto-erotic, governed by fantasy, governed by the unconscious. … For Freud, the ‘sexual’ is exterior to, even prior to, the difference of the sexes, even the difference of the genders: it is oral, anal or para-genital” (Freud 161). A notion of the sexual that is prior to sexual difference—or prior to gender—is one that may be especially challenging for us to apprehend. Nothing could be easier than turning a blind eye to this “enlarged” conception of sexuality in our eagerness to politicize the sexual or otherwise instrumentalize it. I note in passing that auto-erotic, in this account, does not imply nonrelational. The adult perspective avidly forgets the infantile pleasures that remain in the driver’s seat of so-called adult sexuality.

What makes Laplanche’s reminder about the “enlarged” conception of sexuality particularly germane to the antisocial thesis lies in how he connects it to the death drive—or, rather, what he qualifies as “the so-called ‘death drive.’”¹⁴ “In the end,” Laplanche explains, “what Freud called the ‘death drive’ is nothing but sexuality in its most destructured and destructuring form” (Freud 145). The force of unbinding, driven by a logic of intensification, can make sexuality look like destructiveness, though what is destroyed is primarily subjective homeostasis, the comfort zone of the ego—hence “shattering.” We may need to accept that the death drive does not exist as such. Instead, we live with the Janus faces of sexuality: the familiar countenance that reflects erotic identities (including queer ones), and the countervailing aspect that splinters and unbinds. There is no death drive; there is only sex.

III. The Sexual Has No Analogue

Sketching this argument via Laplanche allows me to clarify a point I was trying to make, earlier in the antisocial thesis debate, via Guy Hocquenghem. My claim was that what we have come to call the antisocial thesis precedes Homos by at least twenty years (“Antisocial” 827). It begins with Hocquenghem’s Deleuzean reading of Freud in Homosexual Desire (1972), which contends that “homosexual desire is neither on the side of death nor on the side of life; it is the killer of civilized egos” (150). What Hocquenghem identified as “homosexual desire” comes extremely close to the “enlarged” conception of sexuality—as polymorphously perverse and driven by a logic of intensification rather than object-orientation—described by Laplanche. Homosexual desire is not specific to homosexually identified persons, as Hocquenghem conceives it, but transverses and thereby thwarts what we ordinarily think of as sexual orientations, preferences, or identities. I would characterize this as a fundamentally psychoanalytic thesis, rather than a “presocial thesis” (Caserio 820), and I am grateful to Robert Caserio for pushing me to clarify the distinction.¹⁵ What may be deemed “antisocial” in sexuality is a propensity for unbinding that social formations and institutions find intolerable. The proclivity for unbinding has nothing to do with social or sexual identities (including so-called queer identities), all of which are bound forms. “Homosexual desire” is simply the moniker that Hocquenghem coins, after inhaling a lot of Deleuze during the first burst of gay liberation in France, to name the disturbing propensity for unbinding at the heart of the sexual.

Half a century later, Oliver Davis and I ran with the term deplorable to describe this propensity, aiming to make visible the links among sexuality, unbinding, and hatred in the age of Trump. If the deplorable serves as one more gloss on “antisocial,” then our sense of the term clearly differs from Bersani’s vision of “a revolutionary inaptitude for heteroized sociality.” We are utilizing elements of Laplanchean metapsychology toward different though cognate ends, as we show in our reading of “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (Davis and Dean 64-73). For now, the significance of unbinding may be illuminated by Laplanche’s crucial distinction between instinct and drive. Speaking of “adult infantile sexuality,” he argues that it has “its own principle of functioning, which is not a systematic tendency towards discharge, but a specific tendency towards the increase of tension and the pursuit of excitation” (Freud 142). Whereas a sexual instinct aims toward discharge and the homeostatic reduction of tension (as exemplified in orgasm), a sexual drive aims conversely to increase and intensify excitations past the usual limits. Sex can feel overwhelming, even traumatic, because the drive conduces to disequilibrium rather than homeostasis. Psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou aptly describes this as “the escalating economy of the sexual drive” (53); and it helps to account for why insatiability, far from a sexual aberration, is the unsettling norm of the drive.

If, according to Laplanche, instinct and drive push in different directions, then so do eros and sexuality. These terms are far from synonymous. “Eros is what seeks to maintain, preserve, and even augment the cohesion and the synthetic tendency of living beings and of psychical life,” Laplanche explains. “Whereas, ever since the beginnings of psychoanalysis, sexuality was in its essence hostile to binding—a principle of ‘un-binding’ or unfettering (Entbindung) which could be bound only through the intervention of the ego” (Life 123). Hence, sexuality opposes not the social per se (that would reinscribe the repressive hypothesis) but more specifically its bound forms, including every illusion of sexual identity. One paradox of the contemporary commitment to discourses of identity is that “sexual identities,” insofar as they are cathected as identities, remain phobic of the sexual-as-unbinding. The politics of identity, so earnestly advocated by liberals and progressives in the United States, is a profoundly anti-sexual politics.

Laplanche has pointed to these distinctions by suggesting that gender serves as a mechanism of psychical binding; but what about race?¹⁶ If we accept that sexuality is more than a category of social differentiation, then how should race be considered in this context? Linking sexuality to race as intersecting axes of difference was the solution Muñoz proposed to the “antirelational” thesis he associated with both Homos and No Future. And yet Edelman, having taken Muñoz to exemplify the position he opposed, has recently announced that his version of the antisocial thesis explains processes of racial exclusion after all. The claims of Bad Education, elaborated in this issue’s interview with the author, represent a striking reversal disguised as a development of the original position. Muñoz, having served as a convenient foil for Edelman’s argument, has now been strategically redeployed in the wake of George Floyd as an ally. When Omid Bagherli asks how Blackness, queerness, and femininity are “loosely analogous”—and specifically how “sex” fits into his iteration of the antisocial thesis—Edelman replies: “What truly links these fields for me is that sex, queerness, Blackness, and woman are all signifiers that contest, far more than they specify, their referents. … For me, those various signifiers attempt to nominate figures of exclusion from the determining frameworks of meaningfulness or of value. Rather than signifiers, in other words, of ontologically determinate beings, they are figures for what remains outside the horizon of ontology.” This is the deconstructive logic of constitutive exclusion, familiar from Judith Butler’s early work, extended to queerness, Blackness, transness, and “Woman” insofar as these are signifiers. It is because these diverse phenomena are treated purely as signifiers that they can be juggled with the same hand.

This is fine as far as it goes; it just doesn’t go nearly far enough. Sex remains the sticking point. In the exchange with Bagherli, Edelman spells out his thoroughly desexualized understanding of sex:

The thing to understand here is that sex as a psychoanalytic concept is not a substantive that designates either an empirical condition (as some would understand “male” and “female”) or any putative relation between sexuated subjects. Sex, instead, is the indicator of a cut, a gap, a division that enables the process of sexuation. It is the fundamental division by means of which a world of meaning takes shape. It is not a division that emerges by recognizing a priori differences, by seeing how things “really” are. It’s the division that makes possible the being of things, and the being of the world, in the first place. That’s why a crucial analog for that foundational division is Ferdinand de Saussure’s differentiation of signifiers and signifieds. … Understanding sex in this way allows us to see that race and sexuality function similarly.

I could not disagree more. It is only by virtue of their total reduction to the register of signification that sexuality and race are here made analogous. Needless to say, I am no more persuaded by Edelman’s reduction of sexuality to Saussurean linguistics (or the gap between signifier and signified) than I am by Muñoz’s reduction of sexuality to demographic categories of difference. The expediency of both accounts is that they make gender, sexuality, and race effectively homologous; the limitation is that, in so doing, they elide not only the specificity but also the difficulty of the sexual. Both Muñoz and Edelman sacrifice sex for political convenience. They do so quite differently but nevertheless thoroughly and completely. This is the context in which, in Hatred of Sex, Oliver Davis and I mounted a critique of the role of intersectionality in queer theory—a critique that the present remarks aim to amplify.

Discussing the antisocial thesis, Edelman rather disingenuously lumps my critique of No Future with Muñoz’s.¹⁷ As I hope is clear by now, my psychoanalytic argument was notably distinct from the latter’s sociopolitical one. Edelman’s recent claims about the analogous functioning of sexuality and race enable me to clarify how far I dissent from both positions, including repeated attempts to reduce the antisocial thesis debate to “two sides.” There were always more positions in the debate than either he or Muñoz was willing to acknowledge; the latter’s argument was simply the softer target for Edelman. Given how the debate has played out, I want to emphasize not that racial fantasies are irrelevant to the antisocial thesis, but rather that sexuality and race function at completely different levels. As an active force of unbinding, sexuality has no analogue among the manifold concepts and paradigms devised to explain racial injustice. What is specifically psychoanalytic about sexuality is the polymorphous, the paragenital, and the propensity toward unbinding, not the logic of exclusion or proliferating tropes of difference. One might even say that what distinguishes the sexual is its persistence at overriding tropes of difference in the pursuit of pleasure.¹⁸

That persistence is also, of course, the problem. Recognizing the specificity of the sexual poses an insuperable challenge for any account that wishes to harness sexuality toward political ends. The sexual remains intractable—which is why it vanishes so quickly from most critical arguments, including those that ostensibly take sex or sexuality as their topic. Teresa de Lauretis, one of the founders of queer theory in North America, has registered this intractability in her own discussion of the antisocial thesis:

The impasse, the negativity inherent in [Freud’s] view of human society, is at odds with the politics of gender or indeed with any politics, if by politics we mean action aimed at achieving a social goal, whether that is the common good or the good of some. This being at odds of sexuality and politics is at the core of what I have called the equivocations of gender, the confusion of gender and sexuality. I think that it also subtends the arguments for an antisocial politics of queer theory. Political contestation, opposition, or antagonism is anything but antisocial; it is constitutive of a democratic society. What is antisocial is sexuality, the pleasure principle, and most of all the death drive.

(“Queer Texts” 254)¹⁹

In her compelling critique of the politics of No Future, de Lauretis draws specifically on Laplanche, though she might have been more precise in the final sentence quoted above. What renders sexuality ineluctably “antisocial” is the paradoxical aspect of the pleasure principle—its escalating economy, its resistance to homeostasis—that can make it look like a death drive. Sexuality becomes marginally more palatable when we filter out its most recalcitrant dimension as something separate named “the death drive.” Yet to recognize that sexuality is characterized by a propensity for unbinding renders “the death drive” conceptually superfluous, even as it indexes a hard limit to every attempt at conscripting the sexual for determinate political ends. This may explain why queer theory keeps evading the sexual and, indeed, why its evasions have only intensified since Bersani diagnosed the problem thirty years ago in Homos. The more institutionalized queer theory has become, the leerier of the sexual. Respectable queer theorists these days would rather discuss anything but sex.

IV. Spitting It Out

The misalignment of the antisocial thesis with “the death drive” throws light on efforts to link it with Afropessimism. Edelman can jump on the Afropessimism bandwagon only by evacuating queer of all sexual specificity. We need to bear in mind that Afropessimist discourses derive their moral authority from the literal and symbolic deaths of Black persons as a result of enslavement. It is too easy for North American academics, by way of rhetorical appeals to negativity, to elide the complex political and conceptual distinctions among social death, human mortality, anti-Blackness, and “the death drive.” Having indicated how the sexual propensity for unbinding remains distinct from any death beyond that of the ego (“shattering” is not social death), I want also to suggest that psychic unbinding amounts to more than merely another instance of negativity.²⁰ The unbinding toward which the sexual drive relentlessly pushes can appear negative—destructive, traumatic, overwhelming, antisocial—but only from the perspective of the ego as a bound form. Identities loathe unbinding. However, psychic unbinding is also potentially creative, as both Laplanchean and Lacanian thinkers have demonstrated in different contexts. It cracks open the possibility for something new to come into being.²¹

Another way of stating this problem would involve acknowledging just how much of the furor around the antisocial thesis boils down to the negation embedded in its anti– prefix. The thesis remains provocative because it is expressed, first and foremost, as an antithesis. Robyn Wiegman’s contribution registers one aspect of this problem by describing meta-continuities between Homos and the positions Bersani opposed: “On the one hand,” writes Wiegman, “we have Bersani in Homos: anti-communal, anti-assimilation, anti-identitarian, antisocial. On the other hand, we have queer commentary ever since: antinormative, anti-institutional, anti-identitarian, antisocial, anti-antisocial, and even, if you insist, anti-antinormative.” My point departs from Wiegman’s insofar as I’m concerned with the role of negation, which has become flattened to the point of caricature in these debates via its reduction to the anti– and, perhaps inevitably, the anti-anti-. Benedicto begins a process of unflattening by differentiating the historically particular forms of “social negation” to which marginalized populations are subjected from the “ontological negativity” that founds subjectivity. Whereas the former is contingent (albeit pervasive), the latter is constitutive. This distinction between social negation and ontological negation (or lack-in-being, in Lacanian parlance) is helpful not least because the two forms of negativity remain utterly confused in Muñoz’s work.

Psychoanalytic discourse on negation is far from exhausted by this preliminary distinction. Freud showed how the human mind has at its disposal a range of strategies for refusing what seems intolerable. Distinctions among foreclosure (Verwerfung), repression (Verdrängung), disavowal (Verleugnung), and denial (Verneinung) are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Freud’s account of negation.²² The “negativity” that Edelman insists on appears as too blunt a conceptual instrument to register the necessary distinctions. Just as there is more to psychic unbinding than mere negativity, so is there more to negation than negativity, strange though it sounds to put it that way. Beyond what Benedicto calls social negation and ontological negativity, there is the hugely consequential symbol of negation that enables thinking to occur in the first place. As Freud puts it, “the performance of the function of judgement is not made possible until the creation of the symbol of negation has endowed thinking with a first measure of freedom from the consequences of repression and, with it, from the compulsion of the pleasure principle” (“Negation” 239). This “symbol of negation,” indispensable to the exercise of the faculty of judgment, remains a predominantly positive rather than negative development for the human subject. The symbol of negation is a vital creation, not a destruction.

The subtlety of Freud’s account of negation derives from his observation that there is no No in the unconscious. “There are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty,” he resolutely declares, in a locution that itself admits of no doubt (“The Unconscious” 186). If, despite the preponderance of negative feelings such as hatred, there is no negation in the unconscious, then where does it come from? Negation hails from the ego—”recognition of the unconscious on the part of the ego is expressed in a negative formula”—but not in any simple fashion (“Negation” 239). There is, in Freud’s account, a sharp asymmetry between affirmation and negation whose pertinence has been missed in the antisocial thesis debate and its aftermath. The Hegelian philosopher Jean Hyppolite draws out the significance of that asymmetry in a commentary on Freud’s “Negation” presented to Lacan’s seminar some seventy years ago. “Primordial affirmation is nothing more than affirming; but to deny is more than to wish to destroy” (Hyppolite 293). The something more in negation—more than negativity or destructiveness—is the symbol of negation that frees thinking from total capture by the pleasure principle.²³ Freud’s brief essay has enormous ramifications because it engages “the problem of negation in so far as it might be the very origin of intelligence,” Hyppolite suggests (290-91). The essay shows, in a word, how negation remains irreducible to negativity.

As far as I am aware, Bersani never mentioned this essay. Perhaps it takes a Lacanian concern with symbolization to make fully evident the significance of “Negation.” And yet, without referring to it, Bersani ran further than almost any other contemporary thinker with the key insights of Freud’s essay, because he grasped how a primordial negation permits the human subject to separate itself from the oneness of being.²⁴ Or, rather, he saw how negation grounds the illusion of our separateness. As a primary technique of individuating, negation brings with it the ills of modern individualism—though Bersani never put it quite like that. Instead, he extrapolated from Freud’s contention that “what is bad, what is alien to the ego[,] and what is external are, to begin with, identical” (“Negation” 237).²⁵ The world becomes exploitable—less than loveable—by being made external to the ego through a primordial negation. And yet, as Hyppolite reasons in an anticipation of Bersani, “once upon a time there was an ego (by which we here should understand a subject) for which nothing as yet was alien” (294). Far from intrinsically negative, the alien, the external, and the hateworthy must be made so.

The process of making them so involves establishing the world as external to the self in a uniquely primitive way, as Freud explains in his discussion of the faculty of judgment:

Expressed in the language of the oldest—the oral—instinctual impulses, the judgement is: ‘I should like to eat this’, or ‘I should like to spit it out’; and, put more generally: ‘I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out.’ That is to say: ‘It shall be inside me’ or ‘it shall be outside me.’ … [T]he original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad. What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical.

(“Negation” 237)

This division of being into internal and external—a correlate of the imaginary pressure to segregate everything, including discursive statements, into “good” or “bad”—is precisely what Bersani set out to question in his later work. What he called the oneness of being is hard to fully conceptualize because it renders irrelevant those elementary orienting distinctions such as inside versus outside, without which we tend to lose our moorings. When I suggested earlier that Bersani aspires to rethink relationality from the ground up, I was gesturing toward this elemental level of disorientation and reorientation, a level at which our familiar categories of difference barely make sense. We cannot simply go there.

In a remark that understates what may be involved, Bersani and Dutoit observe that the “move into new relational modes requires a certain mourning for the relationality left behind” (103). The radical reworking of relationality is easier said than done. It entails not just one form or another of conceptualization, but the laborious psychical work of mourning established orientations and perspectives. Accessing new relational modes takes a measure of Trauerarbeit. Rather than dwell on mourning that which must be left behind, however, Bersani turns to the aesthetic—less in the mode of avoidance than for inspiration. In his collaborative work with Ulysse Dutoit, he focused extensively on visual art—painting, sculpture, and especially cinema. Yet, for Bersani the aesthetic designated a much wider field of existence than specifications of medium or genre can convey. Aesthetic subjectivity is the form of being that has failed or refused the primordial negation through which psychological individuality establishes itself; it is for this reason that aesthetic subjectivity discloses new relational modes. To grasp Bersani’s sense of the aesthetic, one needs to dispense with any notion of the frame or boundary separating art from life. As unframeable, aesthetic subjectivity partakes of that unboundedness toward which the sexual perpetually pushes.

In view of the antisocial thesis, I would emphasize that the new relational modes characteristic of aesthetic subjectivity cannot be understood as oppositional, antagonistic, or dialectical. They do not involve negations. Whether described in terms of homo-ness, inaccurate self-replication, or the communication of forms, aesthetic subjectivity works with an ontology that eschews divided being. By the same token, aesthetic subjectivity does not restore the unified, centered subject that division properly displaced: the oneness of being gives rise to neither unity nor division because it exists apart from all psychologies of subjectivity. Aesthetic subjectivity remains ineluctably impersonal. Thinking outside the framework of psychological interiority was also what drew Bersani to Foucault’s work on Greco-Roman ethics, though the latter did not name anything like a oneness of being. Instead, Foucault became fascinated by the emergence, in antiquity, of a hermeneutics of the self that bore no resemblance to the psychologized, interiorized self of modernity. Without the primordial negation that institutes a division between internal and external, the notion of psychological interiority makes no sense. How, then, should we understand the oneness of being?

“A distinctive trait of that oneness is incongruity,” Bersani argues (Thoughts 64). Rather than a post-Saussurean universe structured via oppositions, we have an aesthetic ontology distinguished by continuous incongruities. The significance of incongruity for Bersani’s thinking about aesthetics and ethics has been elaborated, in this special issue and elsewhere, by Ricco.²⁶ That shift from a broadly poststructuralist model of subjectivity (evident in The Freudian Body) to a conception of undivided being portends a markedly different approach. Attending to the rhythms of Bersani’s thought has always seemed worthwhile to me precisely because his conceptual moves cannot be readily apprehended within the usual terms of contemporary criticism and theory. His work remains incongruous to the field. For example, the oneness of being is neither a utopic nor a pragmatist idea; moreover, Bersani’s critical approach to art qualifies as neither “paranoid” nor “reparative.” Outside the paradigm of psychological interiority there is no basis for paranoia. And yet because he took Melanie Klein seriously, Bersani was never going to fall for the false dichotomy of “paranoid” versus “reparative” reading with which Sedgwick inveigled queer studies.²⁷ He understood that art does not repair human experience (despite frequent claims to the contrary), but instead offers a radically other experience. To find ourselves reflected in artworks—whether in painting, cinema, or literature—would be to fail to see the impersonal, incongruous aesthetic subjectivity of which art provides glimpses. The focus on “representation,” in both senses of that word, diminishes what we can see.

Stressing incongruity enables us to clarify that Bersani’s relational ontology is neither fully harmonious nor yet oppositional. The absence of negation within the oneness of being makes it, in my view, a poor fit with the antisocial thesis as it has been conceptualized. Ricco’s apt description of oneness as “unlovable” should deter any impulse to idealize undivided being as utopic or untroubled. When Bersani invokes the intractable, I think he means it: undivided being is no panacea. If ontological continuity discloses our profound interconnectedness (before and beyond the illusions of individuality), then it also suggests our implication in whatever we might wish to repudiate. Rather than completely freeing us from violence, for example, the oneness of being compels us to face it as our own. In the end, it may be because the sexual remains intractable that—despite everything said against it—the antisocial thesis is unkillable.

Tim Dean is the James M. Benson Professor in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking and, most recently, Hatred of Sex (coauthored with Oliver Davis). He is completing a book titled After Pandemics: COVID-19, AIDS, and the Literature of PrEP.

Notes

1. Thanks to Austin Svedjan, John Paul Ricco, and the editors of PMC for giving me the opportunity to write an afterword to this special issue; thanks to Robert Caserio and Ramón Soto-Crespo for conversations about the antisocial thesis; and thanks to Leo Bersani for the ongoing inspiration of his work. My essay responds to the rich contributions gathered here, but it also responds to the many baffled questions about the antisocial thesis that students and colleagues have asked me over the years. If, in what follows, I rehearse arguments I’ve made elsewhere, I can only hope these repetitions qualify as recategorizations in the sense that Bersani used the term, and that they serve to enlighten a set of debates whose polemical edge has tended to blunt rather than sharpen their clarity.

2. See Bersani, Culture. He expressed no interest even in Foucault’s fascinating account of heterotopias.

3. As Ricco elaborates in his introduction to this volume, “the aesthetic names that mode of ethical-cultural practice that is without policy or program, and is never about laying down the law. Precarious in its relation to immortality and any afterlife, and unbecoming and impoverished in its sensorial sensuousness, thus providing no final satisfaction or resolution as in classical notions of beauty, the aesthetic bears the inhuman and inanimate within it. It is the realm of imagined, virtual, and speculative thought; it is impossible to detach either from erasure or disappearance in its very inscription and appearance; and it is—without any need to invoke ‘art for art’s sake’—workless, inoperative, and a means without end. Harboring no secret interiority, for Bersani in particular, the aesthetic is one of our principal means of affirming the infinite correspondences of the mobility of forms in the world, about which there will never be a time when all correspondences will have been discovered.”

4. See Warner, “Introduction”; and Trouble. Although Canguilhem’s 1966 study of the modern derivation of “the normal” was foundational for Foucault, for Warner’s conceptualization of heteronormativity, and for biopolitical theory in general, Bersani never really registered its significance.

5. In “An Impossible Embrace,” I argue that Edelman’s version of the antisocial thesis reverts to a repressive-hypothesis model of the relationship between sex and power by picturing reproductive futurism and queer sexuality as purely oppositional (“Impossible” 137-38). In contrast to Edelman, I have always found political critiques of normalization indispensable because they amplify Lacan’s lifelong critique of psychologies of adaptation (Dean, Beyond).

6. With the theory of différance, Derridean deconstruction expanded the possibilities for thinking about difference without positive terms—and thus without consolidating differences into the antagonistic logic of identity (see Derrida, Dissemination). The problem that both Wittig and Bersani put their fingers on is that whenever linguistic différance is mapped onto the social realm, differences acquire a positive content—gender difference, racial difference, and so on—that obviates the non-antagonistic logic of différance.

7. “Everything relating to the problem of pleasure and unpleasure touches upon one of the sorest spots of present-day psychology,” admits Freud with exasperation. Attempting to describe that quality of feeling known as sexual excitement, he elaborates the conundrum of sexual pleasure in the following way: “I must insist that a feeling of tension necessarily involves unpleasure. What seems to me decisive is the fact that a feeling of this kind is accompanied by an impulsion to make a change in the psychological situation, that it operates in an urgent way which is wholly alien to the nature of the feeling of pleasure. If, however, the tension of sexual excitement is counted as an unpleasurable feeling, we are at once brought up against the fact that it is also undoubtedly felt as pleasurable. In every case in which tension is produced by sexual processes it is accompanied by pleasure; even in the preparatory changes in the genitals a feeling of satisfaction of some kind is plainly to be observed. How, then, are this unpleasurable tension and this feeling of pleasure to be reconciled?” (Three 209).

8. This sense of the distance in closeness has been developed with respect to aesthetics by John Paul Ricco as “shared separation” (Decision).

9. For further discussion of Bersani’s critique of SM in Homos, including how he complicates his earlier account of masochism as a tautology for sexuality, see Dean, “Foucault and Sex.” For a compelling account of the psychically transformative potential of BDSM—and one that focuses more on sadism than masochism—see Saketopoulou.

10. The key reference here is Laplanche’s Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, chapter 5, “Aggressiveness and Sadomasochism” (85-102), where ébranlement is rendered as “perturbation” by the translator, Jeffrey Mehlman (87-88). However, in chapter 2 of The Freudian Body (29-50), which leans heavily on Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, Bersani translates ébranlement as “shattering” and effectively makes it his own. Whereas Laplanche deploys ébranlement as a term, Bersani develops shattering into something like a concept. He takes a passing comment in Laplanche and intensifies it via Bataille to generate a powerfully new idea, albeit one whose brilliance has been dulled through rote repetition and poor comprehension.

11. Although contradictions can be intellectually generative, conceptual incoherence beyond a certain point serves only to mystify. Let me be clear that I’m not suggesting Benedicto’s contribution is incoherent, only that there exists a bigger gap than he lets on between Edelman’s (Lacanian) formulations and Bersani’s (Laplanchean) theses. In 2016, at the behest of David Lichtenstein, the New School for Social Research hosted an illuminating set of debates between Lacanian and Laplanchean theorists, with the results published in Division|Review. See Jon Todd Dean, et al., “Lacan-Laplanche Debate.”

12. To forestall further confusion, let’s be clear that Laplanche’s is not an “antirelational” theory of sexuality. He lays great stress on the emergence of the sexual drive in humans as a response to implantation of an enigmatic message by the other; for Laplanche there can be no sexuality without this asymmetrical intersubjective relationship. The point, while obvious, needs to be made explicit owing to the influence of the relational school of psychoanalysis, which not only touts itself as the most inclusive and progressive among contemporary psychoanalytic orientations but also tends to monopolize critical discourse about the relational in certain contexts. Muñoz fell under the sway of the relational school to the extent that its US headquarters are located at New York University, where he taught for twenty years. My view is that the milieu in which he worked gave Muñoz too narrow an idea of what it means to conceptualize sexuality as relational.

13. Here I follow a convention of Laplanche and his translators by referring to “the sexual” in its noun form as much as possible, despite occasional awkwardness. Here is how John Fletcher explains the convention in an editorial note: “Laplanche invents a neologism in French by transforming the German component adjective Sexual– into a free-standing noun, in pointed contrast with the standard French term sexuel. (In German Sexual mainly appears as a bound adjectival root in combination with a noun, e.g. Sexualtrieb—sexual drive, Sexualtheorie—sexual theory.) This is an attempt to register terminologically the difference between the enlarged Freudian notion of sexuality (le sexual) and the common sense or traditional notion of genital sexuality (le sexuel). This terminological innovation cannot really be captured in English as the German term Sexual coincides exactly with the spelling of the standard English term ‘sexual,’ rather than contrasting with it as in French” (Laplanche, Freud 1n1).

14. See Laplanche, “The So-Called ‘Death Drive.’” This argument reaches back to the reading of Freud in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis that had such an impact on Bersani.

15. Or perhaps we should say that the infantile, polymorphously perverse sexual is asocial, rather than consistently antisocial or definitively presocial. Although it is neither dictated by social norms nor fully assimilable to them, the sexual does not come into existence without intersubjective relationships that are themselves invariably bound up in the social. It is the sexual’s incomplete assimilability to the social, rather than the chronology of its emergence, that seems to me the key point.

16. The ways in which gender binds—and may be unbound or rebound in trans subjectivities—has recently been elaborated by Saketopoulou and Pellegrini in a brilliant Laplanchean account of clinical work with transfolk. The power of gender to bind the sexual also helps to explain the widespread reactivity anatomized in Judith Butler’s recent book—though I note that Butler manages to avoid any discussion of the sexual whatsoever (see Who’s). Characterizing gender as risky territory, Butler declines to acknowledge that gender is one of the principal forms through which culture makes safe the more volatile territory of the sexual.

17. Referring to the MLA panel, Edelman wrote in 2006, “this panel brought together advocates of political negativity (Judith Halberstam and me) and those promoting a practice they defined, instead, as queer utopianism (José Muñoz and Tim Dean)” (“Antagonism” 821). In his interview for this special issue, Edelman repeats a version of the mischaracterization: “Muñoz and Dean were on one side and I was on the other, with Jack [Halberstam], at least as I saw it, having a foot in both of those camps.” For my part, having never mentioned (much less promoted) “queer utopianism,” I cannot help picturing Muñoz rolling in his grave at Edelman’s bizarre conflation of our respective positions.

18. I do not mean that the sexual drive is “blind” to categories of difference—far from it—but only that its logic of intensification predisposes the sexual to override divisions and differences en route to unbinding. By the same token, however, the escalating economy of the sexual drive readily exploits categories of difference in the service of intensification. For example, histories of racial hierarchy and racialized violence may be invoked in BDSM to intensify relations of dominance and submission, as has been meticulously demonstrated (Cruz; Saketopoulou). My point is that, even as racial categories are indubitably eroticized (with sex and race often tightly intertwined), race and the sexual cannot be conceptualized analogously (or homologously) without losing sight of the sexual as a force of unbinding.

19. See also de Lauretis, Freud’s Drive 39-57. Similarly, Bersani often emphasized that which remains intractable—as, for example, in his interview with Tuhkanen: “The great thing about psychoanalysis is its most somber aspects, the death drive, the aggressiveness, and something intractable that no social change will ever undo” (Bersani, “Rigorously” 282).

20. On the topic of social death, see Patterson.

21. See Copjec on sublimation (Imagine) and Saketopoulou on the psycho-aesthetic implications of what she theorizes as “traumatophilic repetition” (Sexuality).

22. These terms are differentiated in Freud’s work, though not consistently so. The distinctions are complicated further by difficulties of translation, as Laplanche and Pontalis point out: “The common linguistic consciousness of each language does not always distinguish clearly between terms which denote the act of negating, while it is even rarer to find one-to-one correspondences between the various terms in the different languages” (261).

23. “What does this asymmetry between affirmation and negation [négation] signify? It signifies that all of the repressed can once again be taken up and used again in a sort of suspension, and that, in some way, instead of being under the domination of the instincts of attraction and repulsion, a margin of thought can be generated, an appearance of being in the form of non-being, which is generated with negation, that is to say when the symbol of negation [négation] is linked up with the concrete attitude of negation” (Hyppolite 297).

24. Perhaps the closest Bersani came to considering negation directly was a sentence about Hegel in Thoughts and Things: “The type of negation that authorizes what Hegel called ‘the mere “Either-or” of understanding’ institutes that discontinuity in mental life that leads to such notions as the divided self and the distinction between the present and a lost but intact and retrievable past” (74).

25. A version of this sentence (which I quote from “Negation”) appears in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (136); Bersani tends to refer to that text rather than to “Negation.”

26. See Ricco, “Incongruity.” Ricco’s rich meditation on “unlovable oneness” in the special issue is particularly illuminating. Comparing the “syntactical oneness” of Eimear McBride’s strange novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing with the “chromatic oneness” of Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings, Ricco suggests how art may guide us in “going along with what is unlovable.” This is a conception of art as neither mimetic representation nor moral instruction but, rather, as disclosing incongruity to be “the logic, syntax, and rhythm of the undivided self.” The point is hardly to reframe the unlovable as lovable through positive images of what may be socially disprized—we are not dealing here with a negation of the negation.

27. Long before “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Bersani had explored the pervasiveness of paranoia and the inadequacy of reparative gestures in response to it; indeed, one might interpret The Culture of Redemption (1990) as a book-length refutation-in-advance of Sedgwick’s claims.

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• Ricco, John Paul. The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes. U of Chicago P, 2014.
• –––. “Incongruity.” Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani, special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, edited by Jacques Khalip and John Paul Ricco, vol. 34, no. 1, 2023, pp. 156-64. Duke UP.
• Rodríguez, Juana María. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. NYU P, 2014.
• Saketopoulou, Avgi. Sexuality beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. NYU P, 2023.
• Saketopolou, Avgi, and Ann Pellegrini. Gender without Identity. Unconscious in Translation, 2023.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke UP, 2003, pp. 123-51.
• Viego, Antonio. Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies. Duke UP, 2007.
• Warner, Michael. “Introduction.” Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, edited by Michael Warner, U of Minnesota P, 1993, pp. vii-xxxi.
• –––. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Free P, 1999.
• Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Beacon, 1992.

Federico Pous (bio)

A review of Bishop, Karen Elizabeth. The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror. SUNY P, 2020. SUNY Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture.

The Space of Disappearance offers a profound reflection on the figure of disappearance as a literary mode of depicting, unraveling, and subverting the modus operandi of political life in Argentina. Through detailed analyses of singular literary works by Rodolfo Walsh, Julio Cortázar, and Tomás Eloy Martínez, Karen Elizabeth Bishop outlines a very suggestive hypothesis that traces a collective literary construction of different modes of disappearance. Following Maurice Blanchot’s idea that “the goal of literature is to disappear,” Bishop identifies “dissimulation” (Walsh), “doubling and displacement” (Cortázar), as well as “suspension” and an “embodied superabundant” (Martínez) as literary modes of disappearance which are, at the same time, “symptoms and products” of the disappearance of literature itself. Ultimately, Bishops argues that there is a “narrative commons” in which disappearance operates, not only by denouncing the actual systematic killing and disappearance of dead bodies perpetrated by the state during the last dictatorship (1976-83), but also by putting to work an “ethical commons” that aims to dismantle, bear witness, and eventually cope with the profound terror generated during that historical period in Argentina. Bishop’s interventions touch on multiple angles of the role of literature in the construction of political narratives with clever close-readings, relevant socio-political connections, and dense theoretical reflections that make the book worth reading. From my point of view, her most interesting reflections refer to the tensions between the role of the writer and the political interpellations at the time.

Grounding Disappearance

From a historical perspective, the desaparecidos have become a tragic imprint for recent Argentinean cultural and political history. The systematic production of enforced disappearance carried out during the last military and civic dictatorship included the political persecution of militants and political opponents, who were kidnapped, tortured, and assassinated, followed by the disappearance of their bodies. The proliferation of clandestine centers of detention and extermination (CCDE) was at the center of these repressive practices, leaving a profound wound in Argentinean society. A partial reconstruction of the events carried out by the CONADEP and published first in the book Nunca Más (1985), revealed that there were 340 CCDE, and it was calculated that 30,000 people disappeared at the time. Furthermore, the practice of disappearing bodies after killing political opponents by official repressive forces (or paramilitary groups) can be traced back at least to the beginning of the previous dictatorship (1966). However, the systematization of disappearance as the heart of the repressive system took place in the 1976–83 period, filling the whole society with fear and terror.

In this context, grounding disappearance becomes quite paradoxical: on one hand, it requires proper investigation to both unravel and reconstruct the modus operandi of the state and its repressive system; on the other hand, the literary imagination grows in the space of disappearance, as it is an intangible terrain that cannot ultimately be grasped. Walsh’s short story, “Esa mujer” (1965) about the handling of a woman’s dead body is so effective because he doesn’t mention who she is, even as the reader assumes she is Eva Perón. In contrast, the effects of Eva Perón’s body’s journey fulfilling and overflowing the figure of the desaparecidos in Martínez’s novel seems to overwhelm the hole left by the real desaparecidos in Argentinean society. Bishop mentions the impossibility of burying Evita’s body [in the ground] and its symbolic derivations. In these instances, literature puts to ground, or grounds, these modes of disappearance that cannot otherwise be grasped. By abstention or by excess, each writer appeals to the reader to bear witness and process what is missing. Bishop mentions that her intervention goes along with the allegory of the crypt (Avelar) that pinpoints the impossibility to complete the mourning process, and, of course, with the ongoing work on memory carried out in the country during the post-dictatorship period.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet maintains that “the [Jewish] genocide was thought and imagined by [the Nazis, which] demonstrates that it is possible to think it and imagine it” in order to represent it (qtd. in Crenzel 13). In that sense, the task of the literary imagination could reflect the attempts that preceded the production of desaparecidos during the seventies. And indeed, this matrix of disappearance can be traced as one of the foundations of the nation-state in the so-called Campaña del Desierto (1879-1880), when in the name of “Argentina” the newly formed army took over the Patagonia region killing most of the Indigenous population that were living on that land. The massacre of the Indigenous population, then, and the national narrative that erased the now-called Pueblos Originarios (the last of them were supposedly killed during that campaign), along with the erasure of the afro-descendant population (they were supposedly annihilated after a yellow fever epidemic in 1870), can be considered early practices (and narratives) of disappearance at play at the very foundation of the Argentine nation-state. From that perspective, Bishop’s grounding of disappearance displays a narrative commons that stretches throughout Argentinean cultural history with the ethical injunction of dismantling its repressive apparatus and solidified narratives, while also tending to the wounds and scars left in the affected people that have been part of Argentinean society since its inception.

Literary Responsibility

The Space of Disappearance explores the tension between the general impulse of literature to disappear and the writer’s responsibility to reflect on (and intervene in) the events taking place in the social and political life at the time. In that sense, Pilar Calveiro asserts that the “disappearance power” (poder desaparecedor or poder concentracionario) carried out by the military forces made the “concentration camps [CCDE] and the society tightly united. … The whole society was the victim and the perpetrator, the whole society suffered, and everyone has, at least, a responsibility” (my trans.; 159). This social call for responsibility interpellated especially a generation of intellectuals who were compelled to intervene politically, despite their different political conceptions. In the words of Walsh, interviewed by Piglia in 1970 and cited in the book, “I can’t conceive art if it is not directly related to politics” (“no concibo hoy el arte si no está relacionado directamente con la política”; my trans.; Walsh). This collective mantra interpellated the three writers analyzed in this book in a common search to find the language of the political.

Stereotypically, Cortázar aimed to put the literary games that characterized his short stories and novels at the service of the revolution (particularly, financing and supporting publicly the Nicaraguan revolution at the time). In the novel-comic Fantomas (1975), Cortázar intentionally finds a popular way to spread the word about the declaration of the second Russell Tribunal on human rights violation in Latin America (in which Cortázar himself participated). As a mode of disappearance, Cortázar uses a “doubling and displacing” mechanism, referring to himself as a character (the writer) in the comic, exiled in France, who at the end of the novel talks on the phone with a polyphonic voice of Latin American people. He comments on the prediction made by the superhero Fantomas, who fights against the disappearance of books, about the Latin American catastrophe to come and urgently “instructs the reader” to act. Both the prediction and the call to action were shared by several intellectuals at the time. In that sense, Cortázar doesn’t add a new specific mode of thinking disappearance but a clever mode of denouncing its advent.

Meanwhile, Walsh’s major writings aimed to employ his literary-detective mind to unravel and resolve not only concrete political murders but also the systematization of political repression under the dictatorship. Indeed, in the 1970s Walsh became a member of the Peronist guerilla Montoneros and was killed in the streets by the military after sending for publication his famous “Carta Abierta a la junta military” (1977), in which he denounces the existence of a systematic plan of disappearance of political opponents. In tracing a short story like “Variaciones en Rojo” (1956) as part of that literary trend, Bishop identifies Walsh as a precursor of the other authors. The finding is quite remarkable, as the key to this short story is to unravel how disappearance operates by hiding a piece of evidence in a piece of art. As a mode of disappearance, Bishop discovers there the work of “dissimulation” that adds up to Walsh’s reconstruction of real political crimes—like in Operación Masacre (1957) or in ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (1969)—through the use of testimonies, forensic evidence, and detective-like reasoning. In that sense, Calveiro writes that “the politics of disappearance during the seventies encompassed, along with the disappearance of people, the attempt to disappear, at the same time, the crimes and the criminals” (my trans.; 12). The role of the writer for Walsh is to reconstruct the crime scene in all its dimensions, unraveling the technics of disappearance involved in the covering up (disappearance) of the evidence and the killer. For Walsh, behind the foundation of a society there are a series of crimes that need to be resolved to come to terms with political life.

In her analysis of Martínez, Bishop’s depiction of the different strategies of “suspension” in La novela de Perón as a mode of disappearance is quite brilliant. The novel is about the day of Perón’s return flight to Argentina in 1973 after eighteen years of exile. He was going to be received in the airport of Ezeiza by thousands of sympathizers, but the massacre of leftist militants by a far-right faction canceled what was supposed to be a long-delayed encounter of the people with their leader. Bishop pinpoints that Perón in the plane is being suspended “in between worlds.” Similarly, the “interval between two thoughts” with which Martínez starts the last paragraph of the novel coincides with the exact moment before the massacre begins, constituting another gap that subtracts itself from time. These “suspensions of time” can be seen as moments of the disappearance of history that return with a potency that generates an overflowing violence (like in the massacre); or a simulacrum, in which people don’t believe that the man who returned is Perón. For them, he is a farce, far from the leader they have imagined; they therefore decide to continue waiting for him. In that sense, even Perón “disappeared” for the people at the time. These two outcomes surrounding the figure of Perón speak to the political unconscious of Argentine society and operate as the return of the repressed: armed violence and disbelief, a dreadful combination, reside at the bottom of the systematization of disappearance that was about to begin.

Finally, the idea of the body of Evita as “embodied superabundant” is a result of a post-dictatorship novel inscribed in a different literary trend: the political responsibility of creating a collective narrative that reconstructs what happened with the desaparecidos while contributing to the long process of mourning the traumatic experience. For Bishop, “Evita’s corpse is the narrative mode of disappearance” (160). In Santa Evita, Martínez takes up previous modes of disappearance techniques to make appear, ultimately, “the place of the disappeared in history” (160).

Indeed, the place of the desaparecido exceeds representation through an exuberant production of symbols that permeates the whole country’s social fabric. Evita’s embalmed body proves through the novel that it cannot be buried, “resist[ing] straightforward narrative” as a way of installing the frame of historical memory in the country (187). Along with other literary works like En estado de memoria (Tununa Mercado), or even La ciudad Ausente (Ricardo Piglia), Santa Evita operates as a mode of disappearance that is constantly showing Evita’s body as evidence that, even dead, cannot disappear completely.

From that perspective, Martínez’s political intervention is not so much the “denunciation” of the actual production of disappearance (like in Walsh or Cortázar), but the profound questioning of the modus operandi of political life in Argentina, including the Peronist movement. In the last instance, Bishop seems to suggest that the Peronist phenomenon was already embedded in a similar landscape of disappearance from which it couldn’t be detached. And if we want to understand the roots of the horror and the extent of the suffering produced by this modus operandi—a reading that is haunting us today again in the ominous return of the far right to power—we must untangle its Peronist origins too.

Federico Pous is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University, and works on the politics of memory, human rights, and contemporary social movements in Latin America and Spain. He published Eventos carcelarios (UNC Press 2022), about the experience of political prisoners during the 1970s in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil; and co-edited the volume, Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), about Paraguayan cultural history and the status of democracy in this country.

Works Cited

• Calveiro, Pilar. Poder y desaparicion. Los campos de concentración en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1995.
• Crenzel, Emilio, editor. Los desaparecidos en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Biblios, 2010.
• Walsh, Rodolfo. “No concibo el arte sino esta ligado a la política”. 1970. Interview with Ricardo Piglia, 20 March 2022, https://lobosuelto.com/entrevista-de-ricardo-piglia-a-rodolfo-walsh-no-concibo-el-arte-si-no-esta-relacionado-con-la-politica/.

Josephine Taylor (bio)

A review of Albano, Caterina. Out of Breath: Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art. U of Minnesota P, 2022.

The Wellcome Collection’s exhibit in 2022, In the Air, emphasizes how the act of breathing, our common immersion in air, is a problem of politics, justice, and culture. Revealing the ways that air can be weaponized, and focusing on breathlessness as a site of racial political struggle, In the Air contends with how art and cultural work render visible air’s stratification and the invisible pollutants that shape our atmosphere. Caterina Albano’s Out of Breath: Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art opens with a similar premise, arguing for cultural and artistic responses to the significance of breath as a site creativity, life, and struggle. Writing during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time in which the air we breathe, and breathlessness, becomes all the more urgent, she explores the “intrinsic relation of life to air and breathing” (ix). Albano views art as a key site to critique and challenge today’s atmosphere of breathing and her analysis interweaves explorations of specific art works with an emphasis on the commonality yet individual nature of breathing. Considering the encroachment on breath, Albano’s work is an important intervention in the ways that art and culture think through the problem of air toxicity, as well as an examination into the philosophical implications of an embodied ethics of breathing.

Albano’s contribution to the field of environmental humanities is to consider air from a cultural and social lens, and how artistic and creative work can contribute to and unpack the centrality and importance of clean airwaves to our physical and mental livelihoods. Just as branches of environmental humanities such as the blue humanities, energy humanities, and now the soil humanities begin to grow in importance and significance, does Albano’s work help us consider another central aspect of our ecology through the lens of culture? This work invites us to ask if air has been left outside the critical lens of the field of environmental humanities. Achille Mbembe’s “The Universal Right to Breathe,” for instance, requires us to consider the racial significance and politics of breath in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, demanding a sense of urgency to consider the politics of airwaves. Research centres such as the Wellcome Trust alongside Bristol and Durham University also held an exhibition on the Life of Breath asking similar questions of the role of air in our lives beyond the medical and physical arenas. What is unique in Albano’s approach is her interdisciplinary scope, considering air from the perspective of Mbeme as a domain that is racially and socially stratified, but simultaneously an area of philosophical inquiry, a cultural and artistic inspiration, and a way of understanding metaphysics. What is at stake is to consider how art and culture, and the tools of a theoretical understanding of air, can contribute as well as demand change to the urgent topic of air pollution and toxicity.

Drawing on the philosopher Luce Irigaray, Albano highlights how an air-bound state is fundamental to being in the world: “we are because we breathe” (10). For Albano, breathing is a process of entanglement that involves exchange and individual action, immersing us in our environment while also integral to our individuality as a singular being. Her opening chapter, “To Breathe,” thinks through the ontological nature of breath, how breath is what brings us into being, while simultaneously being dependent on the surrounding atmosphere. As Albano suggests, “to be in the world is to breathe, and life depends on the exchange between respiration and the gaseous environment that surrounds human and nonhuman living beings” (5). Thinking through the ways we render breath visible, its release and exchange, Albano explores the installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Last Breath (2012). It is an installation designed to store an individual’s breath, made of a small brown paper bag which inflates and deflates, capturing the presence of a person’s breath through mechanics of the machine, its sound and register. For Albano, the piece emphasizes the biological function of breathing while exploring breath as a shared commonality. Throughout the book, Albano articulates breathing as inviting a sense of intersubjectivity and thus an embodied ethics. Breath, although appearing an automatic process, is subject to emotional states: the individual’s interaction with their surrounding atmospheres can dictate space to breathe or a suffocation, where breath is restricted.

It is in this vein in which Albano determines breath as a site of autonomy, choice, and self-determination. As she articulates, “breath or its suppression is invoked as a protest against injustice, while freedom of breathing coincides with claims of civic and political liberties” (8). It is through breathing we experience not only individuality but also commonality, and thus to breathe unencumbered by restriction is a political struggle for justice and of autonomy. Breathing for Albano is also an entanglement with otherness and thus invites an other-centred ethics, one that begins not just with the self but with an inherent interdependency. Towards the end of the first chapter, Albano refers to the project Life of Breath, an interdisciplinary work that addresses “the interrelation of breathing and breathlessness in terms of illness and well-being” (15). Paying attention to the change of rhythms in breathing, the ways breathlessness creates a fracture in being, the cultural project itself attends to the ways the body is dependent on air, and how much of the sufferer’s pain is invisible. For Albano, this problem of visibility extends not just to individual health but also to other forms of breathlessness where ecologies, politics, and violence put breathing at risk. Breath is a site of health and well-being, but it is interrelated with structural and environmental conditions. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s claim of the “universal right to breathe,” Albano illuminates how access to clean air, to strive for an autonomy in breathing, is dictated by a social as well as racial stratification of air.

The film Death by Pollution (2021) explores the social justice fight of the mother of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, whose death was ruled a result of air pollution by a South London coroner. The film focuses on the mother’s plight to make clean air a human right and the ways clean air becomes geographically stratified in urban landscapes across racial lines. Contending with the politics of air and the environmental racism that underscores access to breathable and green space, the film highlights the devastating effects of uneven access to clean air in urban demographics. In the chapter “Ecologies of Breathing,” Albano draws on decolonial theorist Christina Sharpe to consider how atmospheres are imbued with social and racial prejudice. As Albano notes, “the atmosphere becomes the foreboding sign of lethal climates of abuse” (27). Breathlessness marks an encroachment on autonomy and individuality in which, as Albano argues, “breathlessness remains a form of control and coercion” (74). In light of Christina Sharpes’s analysis of the suffocating legacies of slavery, Albano recalls George Floyd’s statement in which he repeated twenty-seven times “I can’t breathe.” In such violent abuses of air, Albano notes that the breath “is as much a cry for justice and equality as a call for safe air—in the various entangled meanings that safe air can signify—and an end to political and ecological violence” (71). In such a reading, the politics of air and breath comes to signify a liberation movement focused on which lives are given room to breathe and who faces violent forms of restriction and suffocation. In the politics of air, in which black lives are faced with the violence of breathlessness to police brutality to environmental racism, Albano recalls an intimation of Frantz Fanon’s “zones of non-being”—”since it stands both for a denial of the ontological link to life represented by breath and a disavowal of the epistemological significance that the breath carries as a definer of subjectivity and commonality” (74-75). Air becomes a space of combat, reflecting the violent legacies of racism and histories of slavery which shape black subjectivity. As breathing becomes an arena targeted and weaponized from tear gas to physical restraint, Albano reflects on the significance of the universal right to breathe in the face of the violent structural racism that shapes the politics of air. Echoing Black Lives Matter protests, Albano’s work urges that we consider how air is weaponized against black lives.

Albano concludes her reflections on vulnerability, encroachment, restriction, and representation of air through Anaïs Duplan’s reworking of a Giorgio Moroder song, “You Take My Breath Away: A Sonics of Freedom” (2020). The piece is distorted and layered with sounds of coughing and gasping in which one feels “sonically engulfed in breathlessness” (79). In this song, distinct voices emerge that ask: “Can I pursue liberation? What kind of liberation can I pursue?” It is here that Albano observes how resistance emerges through art, where the song emphasizes breathing as a layered duality. Its invitation for commonality and shared interdependency emerges from the autonomy and shared nature of breath. Albano’s analysis implicates the significance of art in rendering visible breath’s release and its suffocation, the ways in which we are dependent on environments, atmospheres, and politics to breathe easy. It is a poignant reflection on our shared common immersion in air and its layered history, often shaped by structural conditions of inequality.

Albano’s work invites eco-criticism as a field to consider air as a significant component to be read through arts and culture. As the humanities seek to understand the ways culture is shaped by nonhuman components from energy to soil to water, Albano’s work is unique in its approach to considering how air is central to not only our biological lives but also the social, cultural, and political. Albano considers how breath shapes our lives and the ways art and culture render its significance visible. She also maintains an urgent focus on the ways that air is weaponized and transformed into toxic airwaves. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, where a specific focus on air and how we breathe became all the more urgent, Albano provides an important intervention into exploring the politics and cultural life of air.

Josephine Taylor is Postdoctoral Fellow in Energy Narratives and Coastal Communities at University College Dublin. Her research is in environmental humanities and she is currently working on her first monograph on Nonhuman Narratives of Energy, contracted with Palgrave Animal and Literature Series. She has published in the areas of science fiction, petroculture, gender and affect theory. She is also a member of the research collective Beyond Gender, which carries out joint projects focused on queer and feminist science fiction.

Works Cited

• Death by Pollution. Black and Brown Productions, 2021.
• Mbembe, Achille. “The Universal Right to Breathe.” Translated by Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry, vol. 47, no. S2, 2021.

Austin Svedjan (bio)

Some of us came to bury antirelational queer theories at the 2005 special session on the antisocial thesis.

—José Esteban Muñoz, “Thinking Beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer Critique”

I want to wager the following indecency: Leo Bersani welcomed his death and avoided his dying but importantly failed at both. One initial justification for so crass a claim could be that, despite a prolific career, he never edited a special issue. The generic injunction of special issues, after all, is to stake their import on the refusal to bury things. Even as titles flirt with the possibility of theoretical demise, special issues often justify their own publication by animating emergent concepts, resuscitating old ones, and immortalizing key figures in attendant debates.¹ In the case of the 2014 special issue of Social Text commemorating the life and thought of José Esteban Muñoz, this editorial tendency toward the conceptual extends to Muñoz himself. As one contributor notes, “the problem that animates this special issue: José Esteban Muñoz should not have died, but how do we continue to think and live with him (and each other) in spite of this loss?” (Chambers-Letson 14). But in saying that Bersani might have advocated for his death but not his dying, I don’t mean to revivify queer theory’s love of hagiography and claim that while the body of the man has died, the body of his work lives on. Instead, that distinction evokes Bersani’s continual grappling with a problem over the course of his career through his speculation on how to loosen the death-grip that difference and its violent dramas have on our available modes of relationality. The hope was that such a loosening need not necessitate our physical deaths. As Bersani wrote in the closing paragraphs of 1987’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?”: “if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared—differently—by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death. Tragically, AIDS has literalized that potential as the certainty of biological death” (222). But the attempt to wrest relationality from its variously murderous, suicidal, or otherwise death-driven violences and the threatening differences that incite it, we shall see, proves overwhelmingly problematic. In this special issue that problematic inheres in the term “the antisocial.”

The Citational Gimmick

In referring to “the antisocial” in this way, especially in proximity to Bersani—and partly against the inclination of special issues—this special issue attempts to lay to rest what has been termed “the antisocial thesis in queer theory” by reclassifying it as conceptual dead weight. Coined by Robert L. Caserio as the title of a 2005 panel organized by the Modern Language Association’s Division on Gay Studies in Language and Literature, the “thesis” subsequently proliferated in an oft-cited 2006 PMLA forum of the same name explicating the presentations delivered by Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Muñoz, and Tim Dean. Attributing the thesis’s formulation to Bersani’s now-immortal suggestion in 1995’s Homos that there is “a potentially revolutionary inaptitude—perhaps inherent in gay desire—for sociality as it is known,” Caserio sets Bersani and other “explorations in queer unbelonging” against the historical backdrop of an ascendant “gay rage for normalizing sociability” (819). While queer theorists anxiously watched as gays and lesbians readily embraced normative forms of social life, the apparent advantage of Bersani’s claim came to be staked on being against “the social” itself. The debate that ensued from that 2006 forum implicated much of queer theory’s broader conceptual lexicon—queerness, normativity, affect, and politics, to name only a few—as sites of definitional and instrumental dispute. Still today, we are often told, these debates remain protracted, at least ongoing if not still critically topical (Kahan 811). And indeed much ink has been and continues to be spilled over appearances of “the antisocial thesis” and its conceptual kin, to the extent that terms like “antisocial,” “negativity,” “antirelationality,” and “antiutopianism” have all undergone the theoretical rigor mortis that produces everything from intradisciplinary shorthand to introductory primers.² This vernacularization has occurred in spite of a handful of scholars who have long maintained that the false choice between being “for” or “against” the social fundamentally misunderstands the recursive mobility between the two, a rhythm whose very movement demarcates queer theory’s central preoccupations as a field (Bradway and Freeman 11). Robyn Wiegman suggests in this vein that the antisocial thesis be understood as “not ‘a’ thesis” but instead an “arena of interpretative battle” (“Sex” 220).

But given the perennial status of the description of debates surrounding the antisocial thesis as continuing to galvanize the field, one does have to wonder where exactly such “battles” are taking place. One recent site might be offered by Kadji Amin, who, at the outset of a brilliant essay on “Trans Negative Affect,” anticipates his association with the antisocial thesis, and preemptively positions his argument decisively against it:

Before I begin, I want it to be clear that I am not calling for an imitation of the scholarly trajectory of pre-ontological work on queer negativity, also referred to as “the anti-social thesis” in queer theory (Caserio et al. 2006). The anti-social thesis in queer theory is ahistorical insofar as it converts the historically peculiar homophobia of a few decades in the twentieth-century US into a universal theory of queer anti-sociality or queer negativity. There is nothing pre-ontologically negative or anti-social about transness; nor do we need to pretend that this is the case in order to reach for the cultural capital of a universalizing theory.

(33–34)

If the italics are any indication, more at stake for Amin here is not that the antisocial thesis is wrong per se, but that the concept of transness Amin is expanding ought not to be taken as adopting the thesis’s formal or cultural conventions. Forgiving the varied definitions of the antisocial thesis—and my own uncertainty about what adjective(s) “pre-ontologically” is modifying—what Amin effects in his claim that there “is nothing pre-ontologically negative or anti-social about transness” is both the mobilization of a certain field imaginary as well as the calibration of his place within it.³ Even if one were to agree that the antisocial thesis is a universalizing claim that obfuscates ontology and historical peculiarity, the appearance of “antisocial” in this passage—and its only appearance in the essay—is noticeably elsewhere to the sense of it as a discrete concept. Instead, it refers to a larger “scholarly trajectory,” and hence the antisocial in this passage accrues its rhetorical significance in a metaconceptual, idiomatic register. If there’s a kind of “cultural capital” that risks being accumulated in the formulation of transness in this example, then it is precisely in the repetition of a critical habitus that uses the antisocial as a whetstone against which to sharpen one’s own concept. In this capacity, the “antisocial” as it appears today, if it appears at all, is far flung from the heroic staking of some claim in a conceptually fraught battlefield. It appears, in a word, as a citational gimmick. As Sianne Ngai has pointed out, the negative judgments knotted around misgivings about the saving of time and reduction of labor and their relationship to value that formally comprise the gimmick often extend to ideas themselves, and even have a history of being anxiously associated with criticism (4–9; 54–55). Such gimmicks appear in Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick as labor-saving devices like argumentative generalizations, prefabricated formulae, and reified concepts.

Any of these would do, but the kind of citational gimmick I’m describing here is instrumentalized not in its adoption but in its dismissal. The very real critical utility of the “antisocial” as a gimmick lies in its setting of other concepts in an adversarial relationship to it.⁴ In such an all-or-nothing relation, my uncertainty about the adverbial modifier in the above example is almost beside the point. Whether there is nothing antisocial or nothing preontologically antisocial, transness is here defined, well, transitively: it not antisocial so as not to be aligned with the antisocial thesis, so as not to be aligned with the critics, texts, concepts, and subject positions associated with that “scholarly trajectory.” Ironically, the form of the citational gimmick is akin to what Andrea Long Chu accuses Karen Barad of turning transness itself into when she claims that for Barad the very word “trans” does “zero theoretical work” and instead functions as “an au courant garnish” (112). But while Barad, if one agrees with Chu, appropriates “trans” merely for the clout of a trendy theory, with each deployment of the “antisocial” the illusory conceptual hegemony of the “thesis” as well as its dramatis personae are paradoxically reified through its repeated assassination. As J. Logan Smilges’s recent gloss of the antisocial thesis as a “failur[e] worth knowing” makes clear, the citational gimmick of the antisocial has proved vital for securing that critical (if not institutional, tenurial) capital variously lavished as “inventive,” “original,” “radical” that distinguishes a critic’s position from the old hat—alchemizing individual arguments into field interventions (26). Or, to be somewhat crude about it, “the antisocial thesis in queer theory” is an especially good dead horse to beat.

But isn’t much of this generally par for the course when it comes to the critical conventions, understandably endemic to the realities of institutional and scholarly legibility, of locating arguments and concepts within a field’s history? Sure. But it’s telling, for instance, that in the last decade some of the most sustained engagements with the debates supposedly at once most pressing and most foundational to the field have taken place primarily in book reviews and graduate dissertations, for which citational positionings are the most generic, if not most obligatory, aim.⁵ And even as citational gimmicks and theoretical camp-iness abound, especially unexpected and tacit alliances have been forged around the disavowal of the “antisocial.” Consider the surprising compatibility that emerges when this example from Amin is placed alongside Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s claim in the preface to Sex, or the Unbearable that “the very name ‘antisocial’ disregards our persistent embeddedness in and attentiveness to sociality,” such that “negativity, far from being reductively antisocial, is invariably an aspect of the social” (xiii-xiv). Just as there is, for Amin, nothing (pre-ontologically) antisocial about transness generally or trans negative affect specifically, it seems there is similarly nothing antisocial—both as nomenclature (“the very name ‘antisocial’”) and as concept (“reductively antisocial”)—about negativity for Berlant and Edelman. Nobody, it seems, wants to be called a theorist of the antisocial. Given that, as Wiegman argues, “theoretical discourses live and die according to the value conferred on the concepts derived from them” (Object 20), what I want to underscore in all of this is the principal role that the antisocial has had in developing various contemporary field imaginaries through the conceptual vitalizations that are achieved by its exorcism. Protocols of critical production, rather than the rules of engagement in an “arena of interpretative battle,” have been the antisocial thesis’s funeral rites—with its citation serving as its grave.

Not Your Daddy’s Antisocial Thesis

But it would be a mistake to eulogize or, worse yet, resuscitate the “antisocial thesis in queer theory” ceremoniously disposed of in these scenes of critical provincialism, if only for the reason that it was already dead on arrival. Already by Caserio’s claim in 2006 that the antisocial thesis was formulated by Homos had a fatal sort of misattribution taken place. Mounting from Caserio’s relatively benign invitation to consider whether the connection between Bersani’s critique of the rights-based claims for gay inclusion and a “subversion” of sociality more broadly is justified, a breath-takingly prosaic association metastasized between rhetoric of the “antisocial” and a politic flaunting itself as the exit door from society tout court. Hence, one persistent and especially vocal interpretation is that the antisocial thesis naively offers liberation through an outright rejection of society and its ordering logics—of “simply opting out” (Muñoz, Cruising 94). Adversaries of the antisocial thesis in this vein rightfully reject the supposition that by “embracing his abjection … the gay antihero attains a paradoxical freedom from social constraint” (Ruti 4). This is, I think, wrong. But to keep with its contrapuntal understanding for a moment, it is only those “queers” who most stand to benefit from those very same constraints and ordering logics who could bear their opting out from them—they could be alive and yet relish in their social death. As Bobby Benedicto explores through queer of color critique in his essay “Queer Beyond Repair,” included in this special issue, such arguments claim that in order to have a “self” to “shatter” or to be a subject able to abandon the social, one must be in full possession of a subjectivity foundationally dispossessed from those abjected on the basis of race, gender, or, in Muñoz’s words, “other particularities that taint the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of difference” (“Thinking” 825). But it is precisely the belief that an Other is in full possession of sovereign subjectivity that has not been granted to oneself that is symptomatic of a universal lack psychoanalysis understands as castration anxiety. Less an evaluation of the all too real uneven disbursements of privilege generated by a historically contingent episteme than a belief in a “wholeness that never was [for me],” Benedicto does well to show that even while these critics dismiss the antisocial thesis on the basis of its ahistoricism or its disregard for material reality (or, indeed, its pre-ontology), their projection of a fully endowed subject capable of “opting out” drives the very illogic they aim to critique.

The misattribution of such narratives of opting out has had the unfortunate effect of narrowing an expansive and complex body of work, a narrowing from which Muñoz himself is hardly exempt. What most of the contributions to this special issue show by exception is just how easily this choreography of field formation and its rehearsal can turn Homos, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” No Future, and Cruising Utopia into phrases that signify not discrete arguments and the titles of books or articles in which they are found but a cast of characters and scripts in a staged production of theoretical rock-paper-scissors. These texts then risk becoming the kinds of “fantasy books” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claimed that we and our fields invest in exclusively “from their titles, from reading reviews, or hearing people talk about them” (625). But Homos, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” and No Future are no more manifestos to leave society than Cruising Utopia is a travel brochure for a sixteenth-century island. It’s not that people haven’t been doing the reading per se, it is that much conceptual difficulty has been elided for the sake of efficient dispensations.

In an answer to the question of his relationship to the antisocial thesis posed in a 2014 interview with Mikko Tuhkanen, Bersani notes that

[a]lready in Homos I was trying to think of connectedness, that is, trying to adapt the idea of “correspondences of form” to psychic correspondences; I was thinking of homosexuality as a kind of psychic correspondence of sameness. This now strikes me as taking the sameness in same-sex desire too literally. It was too literal and too arbitrary: sameness is obviously not the only thing between gay people, and there’s more difference very often between two gay people than there is between a gay person and a straight person. So the argument in Homos strikes me as a somewhat unfortunate application of the idea of correspondences and connectedness. But to the extent that I was, and have always been, interested in the Foucauldian idea of “new relational modes,” it seemed to me that the precondition for such modes has to be a kind of antisocial breaking-down of relations.

(“Rigorously” 280)

Understood by this light, Homos was less the pitch for some relational proscription, let alone any “thesis,” than a (mis)application of his continued interest in the “correspondences of forms” onto the object of homosexuality as a specific practice that might invite the kind of death—the “antisocial breaking-down”—required for the formulation of new modes of connection. In his contribution to the 2006 forum, Dean predicts this explanation by temporalizing a transformation from the normatively-bounded to the orgiastically-connected self through the antisocial, constituting what Caserio terms a “presocial thesis” (820). At its most gleeful, such a process, as Dean extrapolates from Homos’ neologism “homo-ness,” would produce “a paradoxical form of narcissism in which not only the envelope of selfhood but the very distinction between self and other is undone” (389). There is perhaps good reason to be anxious about such narcissism, however. Juana María Rodríguez, for instance, points out that installing the “erasure of difference as the only available means of touching sociality comes dangerously close to advocating a color-blind, gender-blind, difference-blind future” (Sexual Futures 10).6 On the one hand, then, we have Homos caricatured as boasting an exit from the social through abject specificity and, on the other, a commitment to being with other people so zealous that “specificity” itself becomes a fickle term.In this special issue, the legacy of such a “presocial thesis” is perhaps represented by Tom Roach’s “Virtual Presents, Future Strangers.” Attending to the photography of Juan Pablo Echeverri, Roach argues that the aesthetic similitude and physical proximity of Echeverri’s portraits produce an ethics of fungibility. In being fungible—though not identical—relationality is not made difference-blind, but becomes less sadistic by being structured by correspondences between diverse yet typified forms. We would then be, as Roach claims, “alike in form and singular in content.” And yet, for Roach this movement is to undergo a process reminiscent of Dean and Bersani: “only by breaking with all familiar connections might we conceive of new ones.” Or, more exactly, as John Paul Ricco argues in this issue’s “Unlovable Oneness,” by emphasizing Bersani’s recurrent interest in aesthetics through Eimear McBride, Ellsworth Kelly, and Glenn Ligon, Homos’ proposition of a relationality representing otherness through “inaccurate” sameness rather than difference is not one of a metamorphosis into a novel form of subjectivity. Instead, it is a self specified through its relation to otherness. In taking the world as alikeness, the self is not “in the sense of becoming something other than who or what one is, but of being converted to self via the discovery of formal and hence impersonal correspondences with other people and things, with which one resonates, but does not imitate or resemble … in being like others one is more like oneself.” Even as the conversion described here is not the “death” of the subject nor its literal demise, it nevertheless does represent a kind of soft reset of relationality realized through the jolt of the aesthetic. My sense of things is somewhat different, but what is to be underscored here is that while citational practices have continued to readminister the misattribution of “opting out” to Bersani and Edelman, what rhetorical distances from “antisocial” and these procedural clarifications of the “presocial” continue to point out is how one could never be supra-social. That is what I mean when I say that “the antisocial thesis in queer theory” was dead on arrival: it was introduced with no actual adherents.

Antisocial Theory

Given all the declarative misattributions and citational assassinations, and rather than conduct an autopsy of that 2006 forum any more than necessary, I think it better to take a cue from Bersani’s separation of death from dying to formally pronounce “the antisocial thesis in queer theory” dead. Only then may we begin to feel out for the conceptual afterlives of “the antisocial.” In this special issue, the preference for thinking about the “afterlives of the antisocial” gestures explicitly at the body of scholarship routinely understood to be the antisocial’s foil (Wiegman, “Sex” 236). Used most famously by Saidiya Hartman, “the afterlife of slavery” names the persistence of the anti-Black (para-)ontological and epistemological conditions of Black subjects patented under chattel slavery even “after” formal emancipation.⁷ In recent years, theorists influenced by both slavery’s afterlives and queer theory of a negativist bent have converged in their thinking about the site of ontological negation. The work of theorists thinking in the space of that convergence—including Marquis Bey, James Bliss, Rizvana Bradley, David Marriott, Jordan Mulkey, Jared Sexton, Christina Sharpe, C. Riley Snorton, Hortense Spillers, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, and Calvin Warren—intimates that the theorization of the relationship between particular bearers of abject identities and their negativized function in structuring sociality is a correspondence in which antisocial (though not necessarily “queer”) theories continue being played out.⁸

Alongside these formulations, this use of “afterlives” is also a method of conceptual retooling, as it provides a way to conceive how the “antisocial” might have a contiguous—but not continuous—life after the death of “the antisocial thesis in queer theory.” One of the reasons that discussions of the antisocial thesis remain so stagnate, for instance, is that the “thesis” is understood principally in terms of a political program (Eng 162). Such an understanding has disastrously delimited the scope of its “interpretative battle,” with critics evaluating the supposed claims of the “thesis” (to “opt out” or otherwise) by rubrics of political efficacy. Or, conversely, it is understood as apolitical, high theoretical navel-gazing. But our use of “afterlives” emphasizes the sense on which Hartman relies when she later, in the context of Ligon, describes the afterlife of slavery as “not only a political and social problem but an aesthetic one as well” (“Will Answer” 112). This is to suggest, following Hartman—and, to a lesser extent, Nahum Dimitri Chandler and Marquis Bey—that the antisocial be understood as a fundamental problem (political, social, aesthetic) for sociality and sociability, and to grasp for a conceptual discourse to engage it by locating a number of scholars in its orbit. If Bersani continues to play a crucial part here, it is insofar as his preference for the non-redemptive and anti-pastoral provides an especially useful method to feel out this problem without the impulse to feverishly force its illusory closure.

In an interview for this issue with Omid Bagherli, however, Edelman notes that Bersani himself is not exempt from a redemptive impulse, or what Edelman calls “recuperations.” In line with my sense of the important differences between the viable (political, social, aesthetic) and non-viable (physical) “deaths” that pervade Bersani’s career, Edelman periodizes Bersani’s thought in and after Homos as a movement from the antisocially “negative” of psychoanalysis to the relationally “affirmative” of aesthetics, with the tension between the two characterizing his later work.⁹ Indeed, the violent forms of relationality Bersani so often wants to jettison are the results of a negativity unleashed by difference. With homo-ness, for instance, it is not difference itself but the sadistic or suicidal attempt to overcome difference that is obliterated. Even if difference itself can never be elided, Bersani suggests it can be recategorized as “a nonthreatening supplement to sameness” (Homos 7). But to make difference “nonthreatening” is nevertheless a kind of redemption. Edelman goes on to implicate all projects (including his own) seeking to realize or accede to negativity as “encountering the negative’s inevitable reversion to positivity.” Like the processes described by Dean, Roach, and Ricco, Bersani’s “recuperations” suggest that the antisocial is a teleology that points toward sociality rather than itself. In suggesting that the antisocial be understood as a “problem,” however, I am merely pointing out the obverse. Although Bersani’s recuperative tendencies, whether as a scholar of nonthreatening alterity, aesthetic correspondence, or presocial theses, are by now familiar, I am drawn to the moments throughout Bersani’s body of work where he (and, in some cases, he and Ulysse Dutoit) comes up against the inability for new configurations—be they political, social, or aesthetic—to ameliorate the intrinsic potential for antagonism in any arrangement. Examples abound, but consider that even during his aesthetic period of “affirmation” Bersani continuously approaches a limit: be it when in Rothko’s boundary-exploding canvases “the marks of difference can never entirely disappear”; when the aesthetic training of a relationality not driven by the epistemological injunction of the enigmatic signifier found in the works of Caravaggio is tempered by the ways in which “being human depends to a significant degree on that soliciting [of the enigmatic signifier] … the paranoid aggression that is its consequence cannot be wholly erased”; or when in Pierre Bergounioux’s La Casse Bersani sees the “invincible resistance to the invention of new relational mobilities” as rejoining the pursuit of the “utopic reality” of universal oneness (Bersani and Dutoit, Arts 144; Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets 94; Bersani, Thoughts 113–14).

It is these moments when the ambitions of will are profoundly deflated—when antisociality subtends some of the most convincing arguments ever made for expansive sociability—that signal Bersani’s awareness to the antisocial and its problematic recurrence. In drawing our attention to Bersani’s recuperative tendencies, Edelman points to a passage from 2004’s Forms of Being where Bersani and Dutoit advocate for correspondences as “yielding an ascetic pleasure that may, at least intermittently, supersede the jouissance of ‘the blindest fury of destructiveness’” (qtd. in Bagherli). And yet, just two years later in “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” Bersani reworks this sentence, noting that the education in our connectedness to the world taught to us by Michon is constrained by “the complexity of a human destiny that … we will undoubtedly never stop insisting—if only intermittently—that the jouissance of an illusion of suppressing otherness can surpass the pleasure of finding ourselves harbored within it” (174). To go even further, not only does the antisociality of difference outstrip the comforts of inclusive sociability in terms of pleasure, but Bersani suggests as early as 1976 that the “history of a human being’s desiring impulses includes modes of exchange between the self and the world, or between consciousness and the unconscious, which would probably reappear and would therefore have to be taken into account in any society” (Future 8).

Part of the resistance to formulations like this is that the tightness of its logic might be taken to betray a stifling preference for the structural. Indeed, in words conducive to my proposition for this special issue, “the problem,” Edelman remarks in his interview with Bagherli, “is not the shape of a particular social order, but the fact of social order itself.” The social as an “order” here traffics in queer theory’s perspective, canonical since at least Michael Warner in 1993, of the social as the effect of normalization. Reproducing the social theory of Hannah Arendt via her argument in The Human Condition that the advent of the modern “social realm” came about alongside the confirmation of “certain patterns of behavior, so that those who did not keep the rules could be considered to be asocial or abnormal,” Warner suggests that the value of queer politics is to reject not only regimes of normativity but their formalization of societies—to reject “the cultural phenomenon of societalization” (Arendt 41–42; Warner xxvii). In lending “asocial” outsiders an especial, rule-breaking purchase, Arendtian social theory thus provides the negative object against which queer theory—a field coalesced around antinormativity at precisely this moment—coheres (Wiegman and Wilson 1). The privileged occasion of the “asocial” is that which allows for what Joshua J. Weiner and Damon Young propose as “queer bonds.” In their desire for maintaining bonds of both fragmentary and unifying capacities, Weiner and Young hold that because the connections forged among queers are organized by the negativity of exclusion from the normative social order, queer theory might constitute “both a social and what we might call a more-than-social theory,” one that suggests the simultaneity of social ordering and a “sociability without sociality” (236–37).

What’s more, this moment in Warner is exactly the same one Bersani responds to in Homos by proposing the more “radical possibility” of pitting gay desire against sociality “as it is known” by departing from Warner while continuing with Arendt (76). For Bersani, the “ordering” illustrated by Arendt that gay desire might be played against is not just the formalization of normativities into a particular social order, but the ordering of relationality in general—hence why Bersani is against Warner’s suggestion of queer as a political identity rather than one that would retain the value of its (homo)sexual specificity for relationality (71–75). Against making gay desire into the political identity “queer,” Bersani’s preference for thinking sociality as structurally interrupted by the asocial peculiarity of homosexuality seems to confirm the routinized charges of its apolitical, ahistorical, pre-ontological, dematerialized universalism, and not only because of the representational lapses of its archive and subjects.¹⁰ As Teresa de Lauretis argues most forcefully—and in the rhetoric of the gimmick—”Political contestation, opposition, or antagonism is anything but antisocial; it is constitutive of a democratic society. What is antisocial is sexuality, the pleasure principle, and most of all the death drive” (254). Although de Lauretis is in fact praising antisociality and even the antisocial thesis on the basis of it being “anything but” the order of the political, figuring antisociality as a problem for politics is perhaps more clarifying of this relationship.

Explicating his argument for understanding the various “figures” made to represent a social order’s antisociality as a “catachresis” of the void of nonmeaning, Edelman argues that the abjection of such figures consolidate that order’s coherence. But that coherence is always—and this is crucial—the fantasy of coherence. “Insofar as every social order must perpetuate that void,” Edelman writes, “insofar, that is, as the structure of the social requires ontological exclusion, requires the negation of the figure made to embody the antisocial—the problem inheres in the social itself and not in its contingent forms.” At its most telescopically grandiose, we might say that the antisocial understood in these terms is not “anything but” but nothing but the political. That is, in its problematicity, the antisocial furnishes the political’s structure of discord, as recent queer theoretical adoptions of the political theory of Jacques Rancière attest.¹¹ Indeed, it is this delamination of the ordering of the social realm from the ordinary acts among both those legible within that order and “those who have no part” by which Rancière separates “police” from “politics” (29). Against any social order, the impossibility of closure, the essential failure of policing, is what paradoxically delimits the political as such. It is, in other words, the evergreen political valence of deconstruction’s emphasis on the aporetic: it is only because the social is unable to fully cohere that it is also able to be changed. The capacity to detach—though not necessarily the act of detachment or an “antisocial breaking-down of relations” itself—is a precondition for new kinds of attachments. Tuhkanen teases out this point most thoroughly in this issue in his essay “Leaving; or, Wide Awake and Staring into Nothing (with Pet Shop Boys)” through the frustrated utopian imaginaries of the eponymous English pop duo and their historical resonances with the ascent of fascism in the twentieth century. The opposite of the antisocial in this way is not even chiefly utopia but fascist totalization; inclusive of, Tuhkanen does well to illustrate, how “utopia” for one might be “fascism” for another.

But contra Edelman’s claim that this is just about “the social itself and not in its contingent forms,” it is not just at the macroscopic scale of social orders that the antisocial conditions the political. In yet another moment of depressive realism in A Future for Astyanax, Bersani, almost foretelling the canonical reception of the antisocial thesis, writes:

Political action alone will never invalidate a philosophical argument about truth. It may make the argument seem superfluous, and it may almost fully discredit the historical use to which that argument has been put. But even in a society which realizes our brightest, most exaltingly generous dreams of the human community, we may find ourselves haunted by the impulses of a self which we had too easily dismissed as an outmoded superstructure of a rejected form of social organization.

(8)

Without getting too deep into the Marxist weeds, even in the political outside of this policed order is sociality marked, at base, by the problem of the antisocial. This “philosophical argument” is very obviously not what anyone would call a political strategy. And, even if it is self-reflexive about it, Bersani’s argument rests on a dematerialized and ahistorical basis. While not a “recuperation” in the sense of a recourse to positivity which Edelman implies, these limits to “human community” imposed by “the impulses of a self”—itself referred to earlier as “being human,” “human destiny,” and “human being’s desiring impulses,” respectively—can additionally be understood as Bersani enacting a recuperation of the liberal subject of humanism that Calvin Warren sees as characteristic of (white) queer theory’s approach of the “limit of subjectivity, but it is a limit, nonetheless” (403). That form of liberal humanism, however covert, describes the kind of subject that actually could entertain the pleasure of its “opting out” but would never really enact it because of the clandestine comfort of that limit. Akin to how Edelman describes antisociality (with which, in Bad Education, he responds explicitly to Warren’s claims), we might point out that the sociohistorical reification of “the queer” and “the Black” are both a hypostatization of a nothingness that, through their effigiation, coheres the human reality Lacanians understand as the Symbolic (Edelman 24–30).

But, as Ricco in this introduction’s counterpart does well to more exhaustively illustrate through Bersani’s body of work, the uncompromising antisociality that Bersani is noting in these passages as a fixture of the human is not humanism’s ornament, but the “inhuman” at its heart. Indeed, as Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen have also noted, the same work by Bersani now dispensed as the antisocial thesis participated in a larger genealogy of “queer inhumanisms” alongside unlikely bedfellows like Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandy Stone, and Monique Wittig (187). That inhumanity not only names the contradictions of the riven self as a structural problem incessantly threatening sociability but also sociality’s contingent form of dissolution. The oblique difference here is the one by which Berlant distinguishes the “inconvenience” of sociability in general and the populations figured as “inconvenient” to the social.12 Or, to be more faithful to my rhetoric thus far, it is the difference between the problem of the antisocial and Du Bois’s sense of being a problem. In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois experiences this difference as the force of history, wherein the “particular social problem” of difference, “through the chances of birth and existence, became so peculiarly mine. … At bottom and in essence it was as old as human life” (1).13 The haunting base Bersani imagines is what Du Bois acknowledges here “at bottom” as the inhumanity represented by the antagonistic “impulses of a self”—one that cannot simply be rejected as the detritus of a historical social order.If the queer bonds of “sociability without sociality” that Weiner and Young’s more-than-social queer theory imagines are beginning to sound—even as they claim that such sociability remains queerly bonded to the social order through its exile—in part like orgies without the order, it is because its form of sociability similarly rejects its antisociality as anachronistic. Figured as both “social theory” and “more-than-social theory,” their queer theory attempts to admirably hold on to the collectivist social capacities of sites of exclusion while ultimately displacing the antisocial “impulses of a self” onto the social order that these sociabilities need not be, as they write, “delimited” by (Weiner and Young 237). Akin to a “presocial thesis,” this is the kind of antisociality one could enjoy as a negativity that leads only to more sociability. But the problem posed by the antisocial is not just, as Weiner and Young suggest, the threat of “a sociality that is ‘not always sociable’”; it additionally persists in any scene of togetherness, even those in which that scene is organized by a collective abjection from any given ordering structure (237). “Negativity,” as it is used today, can often feel to be a pleasurable confirmation of negativity in name only. Similar to the separation Arendt makes in The Origins of Totalitarianism between the “solitude” intrinsic to being a \ sovereign subject of liberalism and the “antisocial situation” that contains “a principle destructive for all human living-together,” in projecting negativity onto the order that excludes queers as “asocial” but not those queers themselves, Weiner and Young thereby maintain queer bonds as elsewhere to a principle destructiveness—indeed the principle of destructiveness—I’ve been calling here the antisocial (628). The antisocial that Bersani, almost in spite of himself, cannot seem to lose is not only about those who are made the asocial avatars of a social order’s negativity. Even as he notes that antisociality is a prerequisite for a creative reorganization of the logics underpinning our currently available modes of relationality, such antisociality persists even beyond the formation of new ones precisely because that solitude, contra Arendt, is connected to the destructiveness of alienation:

Solitude is connected to what psychoanalysis makes us think of, or should make us think of, as a kind of intractable alienation from the world, an alienation from the world which is connected to destructiveness and to the death drive. Intrinsic to being human is a kind of forlorn solitude that will react with violence against anything that would stand in the way of the accomplishment of a desire. And that can’t be gotten over. And this is where I’ve criticized queer and gay and feminist thinking for their pastoral imaginations, their conviction that if only we could get rid of some of the bad social conditions everything would be fine. The great thing about psychoanalysis is its most somber aspects, the death drive, the aggressiveness, and something intractable that no social change will ever undo. And that is connected to the condition of solitude and the condition of our thrownness in the universe that, even when you do establish relational modes, always remains.

(“Rigorously” 282)

What would it mean to form a theory from these moments? Antisociality exists not only in those discrete social orders produced by social theories but also in the “pastoral imaginaries” of a “more-than-social theory” of sociability outside of it. What such an antisocial theory might formalize is how what is described as structural in the above quote (“intractable”) is not the antithesis to the variable (“social change”) but a check on its scale of operation (“always remains”). It designates the variability intrinsic to the social for change, even as the insistence of that variability necessarily limits the realization of consensus, harmony, or synchrony. Rather than the conceptual prison house Grace Lavery refers to as a “romance of the intractable,” the problem—of sociality, of sociability outside of sociality, of politics outside of the policed order—is an antisociality that operates not only on the level of structure, but is lived in ways available to historical and material inflection (xv-xvii). Indeed, as Berlant argues, it is such ordinary states of personal incoherence and political discontent that allow for the avoidance of being “stuck in a drama of the intractable” (133). In attending to the kinds of contiguities and contingencies that exist between subjects of difference and the flatteningly equivalent structure of this alienation, returning the antisocial to theory might actually get us closer to lessening the attendant dramas, romances, and elisions of its intractability.

Whatever is meant by antisocial theory need not aspire to the rubricization of a method to attend to these operations per se, but it could be merely a sensitivity to a kind of object of persistent out-of-syncness. An initial list of everyday proofs that have and will be continued to be thought by antisocial theorists might be: bad (and maybe even bad-as-in-really-bad) sex; history and its hurt; the inconvenience of other people; political disappointment; unrequited love; enigmatic signification; aesthetic discord. All of these are propositional and actively modulated by various kinds of political, social, and aesthetic reactions shaped by the exigences of history even as one can’t exactly “opt out” of them. To go even further, these problems for sociality are likewise the “interruptions” in “aesthetics and politics that aspire to totality” to which Muñoz attuned utopianism as “an idealist mode of critique that reminds us that there is something missing” (Cruising 100). While by no means “idealist,” it is worth noting that in this framing both antisocial theory and utopian critique remind us that the present is never totalized—ignoring whatever security or anxiety such a totalization would offer. Following from Wiegman’s contribution to this issue, “Why Can’t Homosexuals be Extraordinary?: Queer Thinking After Leo Bersani,” antisocial theory might very well then represent another instantiation of what she refers to as “utopic ambivalence in queer thinking.” For Wiegman, one thing that mode of thinking does is pin its hopes on critical practices to recuperate the political losses it simultaneously anticipates. That ambivalent relation to the work of theory “registers its political desire for the not-yet and the yet-to-come while foregrounding its conviction that every queer agenda, destination, or sought after transformation is open to capture.”

Many of us, I imagine, recognize this kind of queer thinking where Wiegman also identifies it: the oft-remarked experience of reading Bersani’s first sentences. As Bersani notes in the final paragraph of the final book, such opening lines eschew from the onset the movement towards conclusive certainties. They instead “caressingly dismiss the reader’s conceptual receptiveness” (Receptive 128). After this long reflection on field imaginaries, the citational gimmicks that make them, and the antisocial as a problem, dismissed conceptual receptiveness is perhaps what the afterlives of the antisocial as a theory might amount to. But, alongside these first words, it might be worth understanding the moments in Bersani that I’ve underscored here, often appearing at the ends of his essays, as pedagogies in what Bersani observed of his own arguments in the anti-preface to Thoughts and Things: “It has perhaps been useful, I now realize, to qualify my utopic tendencies by giving the last word to an uncompromising negativity” (xiii). In closing, like most else with Bersani, I am tempted to do the same. But it is no small part because of Bersani that I know that “uncompromising” does not mean “uninhabitable.” The antisocial that marks the limits of Bersani’s utopianism is not only the failure to separate a redemptive death from a physical dying but also a recognition that the here and now will never be “enough.” There is no death but dying that would solve the problem of living.¹⁴ But if that utopianism is the grave in which the citational gimmick’s avoidance (an avoidance shared—differently—by utopians and negativists) of “the antisocial thesis in queer theory” is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death. Where “we” go from there could only be the afterlives of the antisocial beyond that grave.

Austin Svedjan is a doctoral student and Hamilton-Law Graduate Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Their dissertation project traces the concept of “bad sex” across popular literary objects like the sex manual, the prizewinning novel, and the feminist manifesto in the long twentieth-century as it intersects with adjacent discourses of eugenics, aesthetic education, and sexual liberation. Austin’s writing appears or is forthcoming in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, ASAP/J, among others.

Notes

This special issue is in memory of Leo Bersani and, more recently, Elizabeth Freeman. As I noted at the Afterlives of the Antisocial Symposium held at the University of California, Irvine in 2022, which Beth attended virtually while undergoing chemotherapy, to convene a group to think about the antisocial poses a few problems for us—indeed, poses to us the problem of the antisocial. The participants and audience members involved in that event and the MLA panel, “Homos at 25,” that preceded it attest to value in still thinking of the antisocial with an ever-propositional “us.” My thanks to Eyal Amiran, Gila Ashtor, Bobby Benedicto, Robert Caserio, Grace Lavery, Mathias Nilges, John Paul Ricco, Tom Roach, Rei Terada, Mikko Tuhkanen, Henry Ward, and Robyn Wiegman.

1. In queer theory, titles over the past two decades like “After Sex?,” “What’s Queer about Queer Theory Now?,” and “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” will be immediately familiar. But even after reading the recent special issue of Social Text, “Left of Queer,” one could be forgiven understanding that title as also reading “[What’s] Left of Queer[?]”

2. See Bernini; and McCann and Monaghan.

3. For “field imaginary,” see Wiegman, Object Lessons 15.

4. One might think here how, until very recently with the more dutiful return to feminist scholars like Andrea Dworkin, the term “anti-porn” or “anti-sex” functioned similarly in sexuality studies and the queer theory that followed it.

5. In addition to Kahan and Wiegman—and thinking about the role of prestige journals in the creation of field imaginaries—see Foster; Nyong’o; and Robcis.

6. Interestingly, this 2014 argument changes significantly from the one Rodríguez makes in 2011’s Queer Bonds special issue of GLQ. There she argues that Bersani’s aim of “collapsing of social difference” serves “as neither a satisfying critique nor as a desired color-blind, gender-blind future” (“Queer Sociality” 332; emphasis added).

7. See the prologue to Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route for the most canonical introduction of this concept.

8. Although the institutional lives of two of those theorists—Christina Sharpe (one of the editors of queer theory’s premier book series, Theory Q) and C. Riley Snorton (one of the editors of queer theory’s premier journal, GLQ)—might allude to queer theory having a particular kind of ascendancy in all of this.

9. See Dean (“Sex”) for a more substantive tracking of this periodization.

10. These critiques are by now ubiquitously rehearsed. But for paradigmatic (perhaps even foundational) examples, see Halberstam’s and Muñoz’s respective contributions to the 2006 forum.

11. See the first two chapters of Rancière. See, too, Edelman; and Davis and Dean.

12. See the introduction and coda of Berlant’s On the Inconvenience of Other People.

13. For a more thorough engagement with Du Bois, especially as it relates the function of being a “problem” and problematicity in general, see Chandler. For how the status of the problem in Chandler’s and Du Bois’s work can be relevant for queer and trans theory, see Bey.

14. On this “problem of living,” see Berlant and Edelman (92–98).

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John Paul Ricco (bio)

Why the antisocial? Given the pervasiveness of social media and constant reminders in the wake of COVID isolation and social-distancing policies and in the midst of “the loneliness epidemic” that human beings are innately social and communal creatures, the proposition of the antisocial, let alone any prospect of its relevance today, would seem to be implausible and improbable. So why would one want to take up the notion of the antisocial and its afterlives (in the plural) now? Good reasons might lie in the ongoing dismantling of the social welfare state, the privileging of the entrepreneurial individual in neoliberal political economy, the rise of anti-democracy movements and authoritarianism, and weekly mass shootings—all easily labelled as “antisocial.” But also because of the great amount and diversity of political action against sexual violence, gender discrimination and segregation, the assault on the very being of trans-subjects, the fight for reproductive rights and other forms of bodily autonomy, state and police violence, and the insistence within the polity that Black Lives Matter. In other words, all those activities whereby the political entails the fundamental questioning of the way in which the social is currently constituted (as discriminating, marginalizing, and inequitable), and whereby the social’s configuration is radically re-imagined according to principles of justice for all.

Looking back nearly twenty years to Robert Caserio’s framing of “the antisocial thesis in queer theory” for the conference roundtable debate he organized at the MLA conference in 2005—and specifically his identification of Leo Bersani’s book Homos as the Ur-text of that thesis, published ten years earlier (1995)—we note that a different yet historically related set of political attitudes motivated both Bersani’s critique of the social as it was known and Caserio’s interest in returning to that critique ten years later: the politics of respectability that had come to dominate gay and lesbian politics in the 1990s, a trend that shows no signs of subsiding (“Love is love!”). Meaning that Bersani’s and Caserio’s targets were the gay and lesbian policymakers of various stripes wanting to prove themselves and the cohort in whose name they spoke to be worthy and exemplary citizens and indeed patriots of the state (especially in, but not limited to the context of, the United States). In his 1997 lecture, “Gay Betrayals,” (a double-edged title that should be read as referring to both those gays and lesbians who betrayed the radical queer tradition by pursuing assimilationist politics, and to those queers who betrayed identity politics and the state-sanctioned sociality for which that politics works) Bersani scathingly takes aim at “micro-politicians”: self-fashioned good citizens campaigning to become members of the most powerful institutions of state-based imperial, colonial, and capitalist power (military, church, marriage, and the family).¹ This was a politics driven by a desire no longer to be excluded but to belong and to be included, to willingly subscribe to the liberal utopianism of “anticipatory progress” and its pastoralizing promises of reparation and redemption, and to do one’s part in advancing the future of this illusion and reproduction of the social, going so far as to fully inscribe oneself into the bio-political economy via biological reproduction. With the political goal seemingly to have been to render oneself indistinguishable from others (straights), Bersani was not mistaken to think that what this politics of recognition and respectability amongst gays and lesbians would inevitably lead to was exactly what hetero-patriarchy and the Christian conversative radical right wing in the States was simultaneously plotting: the eradication not only of homosexuality but also of homosexuals.

It is undeniable that the political context of Homos and of the antisocial thesis has been entirely forgotten in the many critiques of either that book or that thesis over the past nearly three decades. Accused of being ahistorical, it is Bersani who has suffered from a degree of ahistoricism that should give us pause, especially as we contemplate many of the prevailing and dominant theoretical discourses today—including queer theory and its recent variants—oriented around the symbolic, the affirmation of identity, and the valorization of the personal, at the expense of the social, political, and economic (actual material conditions and structures; exploitation and not only discrimination). Indeed, if respectable and reparative politics is considered the best way forward, then one is forced to ask how it is that gay and lesbian micro-politicians and policymakers then and now are not partly responsible for the current attacks on women, trans* people, the disabled, the poor, the racialized, the Indigenous, and other minorities, given their focus on local, identity-based struggles that inevitably generate others as unassimilated remainders. While many scholars over the past nearly thirty years have criticized Bersani for what they have taken to be his neglect of the real constraints under which many racialized minority subjects live, it was Bersani as early as 1987 who explicitly expressed his resistance to the very institutions that continue to be the principal agents of the subjugation of racialized minorities and of the very desire of gays and lesbians to become respectable members and stewards of these same institutions.

Curiously, reparative reading and writing as it is often executed today is actually quite paranoid in that the intended goal of the sought-after reparations is part of a process of fervently scrutinizing the presence of harm and wounding, and potentially (or actually) finding the latter everywhere. In his essay for this volume, Bobby Benedicto speaks to this, rightly estimating that reparative reading is the dominant (indeed hegemonic) strand in queer theory and especially in queer of color critique. What to say about this hegemony? One might point out that this paranoia is not unlike those who engage in ideology critique (Marxists, Žižek), for whom objects are not only not enigmatic, unknowable, internally divided, or indeterminate, but are implicitly taken to be fully knowable and capable of being rendered or proven to be whole. These are thinkers for whom their relation to their objects is free of skepticism and suspicion, but also of alterity. To reference Robyn Wiegman’s book Object Lessons, for this camp there are no lessons to be learned from their objects, because such learning—indeed, any learning—would entail encountering objects as things other than the reflection of what one already knows and readily identifies with and identifies as—in other words, to regard one’s objects as neither disturbing nor threatening one’s will to know. But the effect of learning should not be the domestication of objects, nor the affirmation that those objects are wholly coherent, existing somehow without internal division, separation, and without remainder or an outside. That would truly be a bad education! To construe objects as evidence of “the fixed self-identity of things” will always be the work of the sovereign critic, wielding mastery over their objects, as things that cannot disturb their epistemological and decidedly disciplinary project (Edelman, “Antagonism” 822). About the reparative project we can say, paraphrasing Bersani, that the only result of self-non-erasure (or non-self-separation) … is self-non-erasure. Meaning, the inscription of oneself as an “inviolable unified subject” (Bersani as quoted by Benedicto). But with Derrida’s concept of “the trace” in mind, we note that an inscription is always a division, and there is no inscription without erasure. Indeed, erasure is the force and source for the possibility of any inscription.

To gain a further sense of this, we turn to Anne Cheng and her recent comments on some of the important lessons provided by Bersani’s work:

Much of how I think about the psychical and material afterlives of American racism is indebted to Leo’s ways of thinking: how the social speaks in the voice of the personal; how the fantasy of the subject is exerted by authority as well as by those marginalized; how our eagerness for redemption and cure blinds us to the ongoing life of injury.

(Chaudhary and Cheng)

Indeed, it is curious that critiques of the antisocial and queer negativity unwittingly have had the presumably unattended and utterly bewildering effect of turning the minority subject into the figural embodiment of the metaphysically transcendent ego, that is, the absolutely sovereign subject.

As Benedicto points out, the historical context of the AIDS crisis is typically elided or forgotten in the ongoing critiques of the antisocial thesis. For Bersani, AIDS was not only a matter of epidemiological but of ontological autoimmunity. In AIDS, Bersani saw autoimmunity’s revelation of the lack of any coherent self, prior to the threatening (contaminating, infecting) protection of the self by the self. What the autoimmune disease demonstrated was the fact that the self is always at odds with itself, not just immunologically but ontologically. Or, more accurately, it enabled a positing of the ontological as (auto-)immunological—and what we might describe as the immemorial ontological precedence of the posthumous (Düttmann). At the height of the AIDS crisis in 1987, the same year that ACT-UP NY was founded, in a special issue of the journal October, AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, edited by Douglas Crimp, Bersani daringly identified AIDS as the very resource for the radical deconstruction of the sovereign subject, and specifically portrayed the jouissance of anal sex amongst gay men as the erotically ecstatic form of the subject’s inherent autoimmune suicidality. In recent de-negating moves—that is, in self-non-erasure—it is this ontological autoimmunity that is negated. But since autoimmunity is the very means by which the bio-immunological subject lives on and stands the chance of surviving (or not), what remains in the absence of this is not a living being but the figure of mastery over finitude—which is effectively death. If there is a “heroics” of “opting out,” it is here, in this utopian dream of life beyond finitude (Ruti).

For Bersani, a certain critical humility was the antidote to what he termed “critical imperialism” (Death vii), and it is the former in contrast to the latter that enables us to understand what he means when, in the “Rectum” essay, he speaks of a “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” (Is the Rectum 24). Meaning, within the context of his discussion, a deflating of the “coordinated and strong physical organism” according to the “strong appeal of powerlessness, of the loss of control” (24). For as we recall now, but is often overlooked or forgotten, Bersani immediately goes on to define phallocentrism in a wholly novel way. “Phallocentrism,” he writes, “is exactly that: not primarily the denial of power to women (although it has obviously also led to that, everywhere and at all times), but above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women” (24). Which he in turn further qualifies by stressing, “I don’t mean the value of gentleness, or nonaggressiveness, or even of passivity, but rather of a more radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” (24). Neither pastoralizing, nor passive, nor indulging in the fantasy of nonaggressiveness, the humiliated self is the humbling humility of the lessened, non-self-aggrandized subject. For Bersani, the self is not the ethical ideal but instead the site of a certain dehumanization and debasement that transforms the self into a non-agential receptive body, ex-appropriated from its position of power and self-asserting wholeness, and thereby being the access to the inhuman that lies, in its powerlessness, deep in the human and that the (phallocentric) human so often (violently) seeks to disavow.² Such humiliating debasement and deplorableness is what respectability politics seeks to extinguish.

In the opening of a recent review essay, Gary Younge recalls a 1987 performance by Maya Angelou where she speaks of the ethics of a minoritized subject’s willingly humiliating self-debasement as an act of love conferred upon subsequent generations. “When any human being is willing to allow herself or himself to be seen at the most debased level, most demeaned, most dehumanized level—thinking that by doing so he or she can ensure the survival of yet another human being, that is love. Albeit bitter, brutal, painful, that too is love” (qtd. in Younge, 28). Her example is drawn from the history of race in the US: “You all know that Black Americans for centuries were obliged to laugh when they weren’t tickled and to scratch when they didn’t itch. And those gestures have come down to us as Uncle Tomming.” But as she goes on to say, “I don’t know about any of you, but I wouldn’t be here this evening had those people not been successful in the humiliating employment of those humiliating ploys” (qtd. in Younge, 28). It is in this way that Angelou provides us with yet another sense of the afterlives of the antisocial.

_______

Returning briefly to the debate (and for a time the controversy) over the antisocial thesis, I think the entire thing might have been preempted or called off if a different kind of attention was paid to the way in which Bersani opens Homos. For while the first sentence of the prologue to the book, “No one wants to be called a homosexual,” is often cited, what just as often has been overlooked and rarely commented on is the fact that the prologue bears the title, cast in quotation marks, “‘We.’” In the immeasurable distance between that title and that opening line lies the crux of the argument that Bersani will go on to elaborate. That argument speaks to the undesirability of identity, regardless of whether bestowed by homophobia or self-asserted, and at the same time speaks (as briefly noted above) to the betrayal of identity, a betrayal here sited in the homosexual subject and that subject’s capacity—precisely in the singularity of it being “a homo”—to be the detachment of the prefix from the root of the word (sexuality). And thereby to become the site for the revelation of a degree of sameness (homoness) that is universally shared, and that in its betrayal of “heteroized” sociality (read: difference-structured, including in the form of heterosexuality and heteronormativity) has the potential to enable us to imagine and speculate on the logic by which a “we” can be envisioned and experienced.

Bersani’s project, in other words, was less the resignification of gay male desire (as though this was all a matter of theorization as performative semiotic reiteration) than the recategorization of homosexuality as (or by way of) homoness (sameness). In this way, the homo– no longer refers to nor is reducible to homosexuality. Instead, homo points to a degree or a form of sameness shared between two or more persons or things—incongruously or inaccurately—and thus homo no longer functions as a predicate of an actuality, but rather is the speculation via “the intellectual imagination” of an as-yet-to-be-realized virtuality (Bersani, “Gay Betrayals” 43). Which is also not “utopic ambivalence” since it is not ambivalent about any possible reparation, redemption, or conclusion. As Bersani states in “Gay Betrayals,” “The homosexual, perhaps even the homosexual category (what I have called ‘homoness’) rather than as a person … might be the model for correspondences of being that are by no means limited to relations among persons” (43).3 We will return to the nonhuman and inhuman intimated in the above quote, but for now we wish to point out that Bersani’s recategorization of homo effectively frees it from the imperative of categorization. Homo suddenly becomes the predicate that relieves us—”we”—of predication. For Bersani, the singularity and specificity (not the fixed identity) of the homosexual and of gay male desire is its evacuation of subjective substantiality and seriousness, which is not to be confused with self-erasure. In other words, de-specifying is the specificity of the homo, thus making the homo curiously queer.

Homoness is less-ness, and it is precisely by virtue of this less-ness that it acquires its universal relevance for all, where less-ness is understood to be less than any subject, figure, personality, character, or citizen. This also designates homoness as other than the many forms of modern subjectivity: the Cartesian, psychological, Proustian, epistemological, willful, sovereign, and sadistic subject. We might say that the homo is less than and thus “all than,” and functions as the signature of “the ‘homo’ in us all” (Bersani, Homos 10). The less-ness of homoness is also what is less than the socially congruent, recognizable, relational, legible, and included. Hence, it marks, as Bersani famously put it, “a revolutionary inaptitude for heteroized sociality” (Homos 7). Homoness is anti-communal, anti-egalitarian, anti-nurturing, anti-loving, and, indeed, antisocial.

And yet, as Tim Dean has pointed out, Bersani’s project unfolds according to two decisive steps (“Sex”). The first, briefly described above, involves an experience of non-relation via sex or the aesthetic, a self-subtraction and less-ness; and the second immediately following upon the first step, is the opening of new relational modes. In other words, first, the homo is posited in its non-relational singularity, and second, sameness is affirmed as coming from out of the evacuation of any residual traces of identity-difference that might remain in homo. It is at this point that we can begin to absorb one of Bersani’s most arresting and indeed beautiful adages: “lessness is the condition of allness” (Bersani and Dutoit, Forms 165). As Bersani also defined it, homoness is “a kind of universal solidarity not of identities but of positionings and configurations in space, a solidarity that ignores even the apparently most intractable identity-difference: between the human and the nonhuman” (“Gay Betrayals” 44). In his essay in this volume, Tom Roach explores the infinite reciprocity and multiplicity of sameness/homoness, focusing on the work of the artist Juan Pablo Echeverri, and its recategorizations of portraiture and self-portraiture.

One of the reasons for the intractability of the difference between the human and the nonhuman is perhaps the degree to which the nonhuman, in the specific sense of the inhuman, inheres and persists in the human. We are well aware of how—historically, culturally, and politically—that essential inhumanity, universally shared by all members of humanity to the extent that they are human, has been displaced on to certain humans in particular. Accompanying this is a history and long philosophical tradition, operating in resistance to this dehumanizing and minoritizing politics. One form that this resistance has taken is based on the argument for the need to never lose sight of this ineradicable and irreducible inhuman-ness in the human.4 Jacqueline Rose has recently noted that, “In the thought of philosopher Simone Weil, it is only by admitting the limits of the human that we will stop vaunting the brute illusion of earthly power, as if we owned the world we live in.” Rose then goes on to say, “Perhaps, then, if those limits were acknowledged, the world would look less murderous” (14). And indeed, at times such resisters as Bersani and Weil have advocated that in its relation to itself, each subject cultivate a rapport with it, driven by an ethical sense of the ontological and not the sociological status of the inhuman. For those subjects inscribed as inhuman, the same move of resistance applies. This has been theoretically articulated in different ways by so-called antisocial theorists, and it is important not to lose sight of these distinctions.

For Edelman, it is a matter of refusing one’s subjugating figuration and social identity (woman, trans*, black, queer) by zeroing it out, affirming the difference of the zero from the one, where the latter signifies a conception of the unified human subject not riven by the inhuman or any form of negativity (Edelman, Bad Education). Edelman’s argument finds parallels in the work Frank B. Wilderson III, Calvin Warren, amongst others, and their theorizing of afropessimism and Black nihilism, respectively. For Bersani, as we have seen, it is a matter not of refusing but of discovering what of the figured social subject in its difference corresponds to the inhuman as not only universal but also as bearing qualities of sameness rather than difference, and thereby affirming a oneness (not a zero). Yet as I explore in my essay in this volume, Bersanian oneness can only be described as incongruous since this sense is the pleasure of finding inaccurate replications and correspondences of forms amongst humans and nonhumans. And then there are many thinkers working today such as Stephen Best, Eugenie Brinkema, Nicholas De Villiers, Kevin Quashie, Alexander Garcia Düttmann, William Haver, Jacques Khalip, and our contributors,5 whose work on the social, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of “queer unbelonging” (Caserio 819) is articulated in terms of an essential anonymity that persists within identities and names (and figures), and that effectively amounts to a kind of queer neutrality in that anonymity is beholden to the language of neither difference nor sameness. As the thinker of the neutral Maurice Blanchot said, the anonymous translates as “not one,” to which we might add that the “not-one” is not a zero (or a two, either). In the work of the group of theorists just mentioned, this idea of ethical existence as not-one has been phrased, for instance, as “name no one man or name” (Ricco), “none like us” (Best), and “being-not-one or being at odds with AIDS” (Düttmann). The differences between zero, oneness, and not-one point to the range of the antisocial thesis’s precipitants and to a calculable sense shared amongst all three strands, of the incalculable in thinking existence beyond the constraints of the social.

_______

Because of Bersani’s reading of Foucault and the latter’s questioning of the liberatory status granted to sex in the discourse of sexuality (Bersani, “Why Sex?”), and because of his ongoing collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit, Bersani moves in his project on universal sameness deliberately away from sex and sexuality and fully toward aesthetics and art.⁶ It is through the aesthetic correspondence of forms, a notion that he derives from Baudelaire and that is present in his work as early as 1977 (if not earlier), that Bersani finds the kind of inaccurate replications that he believes to be the forms by which each individual subject has a sense of already being in the world. From such correspondences, he has said, comes the sense that one is born into the world in which one is—non-identically—already there.

The aesthetic becomes for Bersani the recategorization of sex and sexuality. As such, it is even more depersonalized than the homo that he tried on as a category in the years from around 1987 and its “Rectum” essay and in his seminal book Homos (1995). One can track Bersani’s recategorization of sameness as a rhythmic weaving in and out of (homo)sexuality across the extent of his career: homosexuality as antisocial sameness (Proust, 1965); sameness unrelated to (homo)sexuality (Mallarmé, 1985); homosexuality as antisocial sameness (Homos, 1995); and sameness other than in terms of (homo)sexuality but as inaccurate replication or recategorization (essays and books from 1997–2018). These later works are to a large extent reprisals of his theorization in the (under-read) Mallarmé book, where, for instance, he speaks of “the force of a shimmering sameness” moving through the poems (7).⁷ This outline affirms Bersani’s own sense of method, about which he was apt to say that each of his conceptualizations is the registration of a future recategorization.

Indeed, in essays and lectures written and published in the late-1990s and early 2000s—”Gay Betrayals” (1997), “Against Monogamy” (1998), “Sociality and Sexuality” (2000), and “Sociability and Cruising” (2002)—Bersani begins to revise the argument he made in Homos.⁸ By 2004 with “Fr-oucault and the End of Sex,” and then two years later with “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject” (2006), Bersani moves even further from sex to art, from sexuality to aesthetics.⁹ As briefly noted above, in his article from 2010, “Sex and the Aesthetics of Existence,” Tim Dean charts this turn of emphasis toward the aesthetic in Bersani’s work, casting Homos as the major transitional work from anti-relational literature and sex to newly relational art and aesthetics. While doing so, Dean also notes how difficult it has been for queer theorists (evidently himself included) to recognize and engage with it: “Queer theorists take sexual variance in stride; we have a harder time dealing with art” (387).

The aesthetic is also where Bersani finds the inhuman: the material-sensuous registration of an irreducible alterity, self-separation, and outside that cannot be assimilated, an ex-centricity that is the radical displacement from the anthropocentric. Wholly impersonal and animate in its inanimateness, the aesthetic is the part that is not a part of any whole. It is what incompletes—being in its essential, finite singularity unfinished—and in doing so gestures or hints at the dark centre of thoughts and things, that which is in us but not of us. Therefore, the importance of the aesthetic lies not only in the way it matches the vicissitudes of queer eros (a connection drawn by Caserio based upon his reading of Tim Dean’s important book, Beyond Sexuality) but also due to the way that the aesthetic has been conceived by Bersani and others as the creative resistance (Deleuze) to the traits characterizing neoliberalism, respectability politics, and reproductive futurity.¹⁰ Indeed, for some of us, the aesthetic names that mode of ethical-cultural practice that is without policy or program, and is never about laying down the law. Precarious in its relation to immortality and any afterlife, and unbecoming and impoverished in its sensorial sensuousness, thus providing no final satisfaction or resolution as in classical notions of beauty, the aesthetic bears the inhuman and inanimate within it. It is the realm of imagined, virtual, and speculative thought; it is impossible to detach either from erasure or disappearance in its very inscription and appearance; and it is—without any need to invoke “art for art’s sake”—workless, inoperative, and a means without end. Harboring no secret interiority, for Bersani in particular the aesthetic is one of our principal means of affirming the infinite correspondences of the mobility of forms in the world, about which there will never be a time when all correspondences will have been discovered. In its infinite digression from any telos, the aesthetic institutes an “unmappable extensibility” (Bersani and Dutoit, Carravagio’s Secrets 89–90).

Like George Orwell’s argument in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” for Bersani the move is from (aesthetic) appeasement not to surrender or opting out but to resistance. This is the argument that he and Dutoit lay out in their early essay “Merde alors” (1980). In their discussion of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salò and his inexact replication of Sade’s text, the authors argue that “it is the very limitlessness of our aestheticism which constitutes the moral perspective on sadism in Salò” (14). As they immediately go on to elaborate: “The saving frivolity with which we simply go on looking [what I am calling non-hypocritical “aesthetic appeasement”] creates a consciousness of looking as, first, part of our inescapable implication in the world’s violence and, second, a promiscuous mobility thanks to which our mimetic appropriations of the world are constantly being continued elsewhere and therefore do not require the satisfyingly climactic destruction of any part of the world” [non-sadistic resistance] (14). Meaning, they conceptualize resistance not via the logic of congruity (identity, exact reproduction, as in the historical cases of communism and socialism, and the political economy of common equivalence or commensurable value) but via the logic of incongruity (impersonal, inaccurate reproduction, as in the communism of in-equivalence theorized by Jean-Luc Nancy). Such a political project is not utopian, because it operates by way of the inconclusive (means without end). The future is not queer, because it must be allowed to remain without predicates if it (the future and those who will inhabit it) is not to be pre-emptively appropriated now, by one’s being all-too confident that one knows who will be there and how they will live there. In other words, the future will remain free to the extent that it remains free of predicates—queer or otherwise.

As Jacqueline Rose has recently written,

Freedom of thought … is the ability to track by means of thought the more hidden, painful and scandalous aspects of human life in a world which has turned … even more dangerous and cruel than it was before. … Thought can be revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, but in so far as it goes beyond the world as known and seen [i.e., is aesthetic in its thinking], it is always the enemy of domination. Like love, thinking [and art] is “corrosive” for the social order.

(26)

In other words, as I have been arguing, there is something essentially and critically antisocial about love, thinking, and art. In her essay for this volume, Robyn Wiegman turns to these questions, foregrounding the distinction between “queer thinking” and “queer theory” (or “theorizing,” thus installing the grammatical parallel) in relation to Bersani’s work (and thought) and the field more generally. As we know, right up until his last books, Bersani devoted a great deal of time to conceptualizing what he understood by “thought” and “thinking.”

To take just one example of many, in The Death of Stephane Mallarmé Bersani defines thought as the suspension and at times near exclusion and extinguishing of external reality (8–9). And that it is this extinguishing in the sense of the putting out of a fire or more generally, a light, that there is, for Bersani, an illuminating of the world. In ways that resonate with a philosophical tradition extending from Aristotle to Agamben, for Bersani it is darkness that makes light visible; darkness is the light of the night, the light that the night is—that nocturnal illumination.11 For Bersani, this extinguishing of external reality included social reality and the persons, personalities, and characters that are the social’s principal subjects and figures.12 Thought is a non-redemptive, moving away, withdrawing, and a departing (including from “the world”)—non-salvific salutation and bidding adieu. Mikko Tuhkanen picks up on this thread in his montage-essay on Pet Shop Boys and leaving, which resonates with Bersani’s own thinking on the eroticization of consciousness’s rapport with nothingness (Mallarmé 76)—that is, the impossible, the negative, the disappeared, unbecoming.In 2021, I published a short essay titled, “Hope, or Pandora in the Time of the Pandemic,” that drew on Calvin Warren’s paean for spiritual hope, distinct from political hope. Following Warren, Black nihilism blackens the world, or using a neologism coined by curator and writer Karina Griffith, it “endarkens” it, which might also be how it “defines” the world. This means that Black nihilism finds its power and legitimacy in its own pure potential which, following Agamben, is also the potential not-to. The spiritual hope of Black nihilism lies in the utter refusal to participate in the cruel optimism of biopolitical futurity that keeps promising a better life, one day, “just wait and see.”In the end, and most importantly, the effort of trying to maintain an abiding and antisocial rapport with negativity, the inhuman, and the irreparable, is a commitment to non-mastery and non-sovereignty, and the renunciation of the will to know and the violence that accompanies such epistemological desires. It is what Sam See describes as “the pleasure of ignorance” and by which he comes to define love as “unredeeming and unredeemable” (196), which is essentially to point to what in love is unlovable (antisocial), meaning incapable of being possessed or every fully known. The title of my essay for this volume, “Unlovable Oneness,” at once names: the unlovability of any idea of unified coherence that would be the betrayal of the lovable; what enables a sense of oneness as precisely incongruity and thus lovable; and affirms such incongruous oneness to be the impossibility of community. Ultimately, it is by way of the unlovable that we arrive at a sense of oneness as not-one, meaning as always multiple in its singularity, and unfinished in its resolution never to resolve into a “superior finality” (Bersani, Future 127). As See argues, this failure to conclude—whether in art’s impoverishment, sex’s consummate lack of consummation, or love’s unlovableness—is the traitorous condition by which art, sex, and love do not fail us.13 And as See goes on to suggest, in affirming the unlovability of our objects, we affirm the impossibility of them ever being totally loved, as we also come to discover that this irreducible antisociality is what we most love about them.

John Paul Ricco is Professor of Comparative Literature, Visual Studies, and Art History at the University of Toronto, where he is Lead Curator of the Sexual Representation Collection at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. He is a theorist working at the juncture of contemporary art, queer theory, and philosophy, noted for his work on aesthetics and ethics; sexuality and intimacy; and eco-deconstruction. Ricco has coedited special issues of Parallax and Journal of Visual Culture on Jean-Luc Nancy, and most recently, a special issue of differences on Leo Bersani. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, and The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (both University of Chicago Press) and has just completed the third volume in his trilogy on “the intimacy of the outside,” titled Queer Finitude.

Footnotes

I want to thank the contributors to this issue, each of whom offers a critically new perspective on the anti-social thesis and Leo Bersani’s work in relation to it. And thanks to Eyal Amiran and Mathias Nilges, Editors of Postmodern Culture, and to Managing Editor Annie Moore. I especially want to acknowledge what a great pleasure it has been to collaborate with Austin Svedjan. Our many conversations over the past two years, including during a week-long writing retreat in July 2023 when we worked on developing our respective Introductions, will be remembered as the highlights of this editorial project and partnership, which began in summer 2022 and I am thrilled to see come to fruition now in June 2024.

1. “Gay Betrayals” was originally presented as a talk with the French title, “Trahisons gay,” at “Les études gay et lesbiennes,” a colloquium organized by Didier Eribon and held at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 23 and 27, 1997. The proceedings of the colloquium were then edited by Eribon and published by the Pompidou in 1998. The English version of Bersani’s essay was first published in his collection of essays Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (2010). The French title of Bersani’s paper might be a play on Magritte’s La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images) of 1929, more familiarly known by the sentence that appears within it, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”), the work about which Foucault published an eponymous essay in 1973.

2. I am, of course, referring to the well-known statement Bersani makes in “Is the Rectum a Grave?”: “The self is a practical convenience. Promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence” (30).

3. Following Edelman’s question as to whether “politics [is] the fantasy, when you break it down, of breaking down figures of fantasy?” (Berlant and Edelman 87), we might also ask if politics might be the configuration of breaking down the fantasy of figures.

4. See, most notably, Lyotard.

5. We can also list scholars outside of queer theory working on various forms of social unbelonging, such as Eleanor Kaufman, David Clark, Daniel Tiffany, and Rei Terada, to name a few.

6. The collaboration between Bersani and Dutoit began in the late 1970s and first appeared in print with the publication of the essay “Merde alors” in October, and it would then go on to include three books that bracket the publication of Homos (1995): Arts of Impoverishment (1993); Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998); and Caravaggio (1999) on Derek Jarman’s eponymous film. These publication dates also imply that Bersani was working on Homos around the same time he was working on the first two “art books” he would publish with Dutoit as co-author.

7. Indeed, many of the themes, concerns, terms, and concepts, associated with Bersani’s later work appear in his book on Mallarmé. These include: “masturbatory attention” (16); inaccurate replication; aesthetic impoverishment; anti-performativity (23); non-profundity; the burying of coherent subjectivity; being without secrets; correlations to the universe; frivolousness (46); virtuality; and self-shattering (65).

8. All these essays are collected in Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays.

9. This turn is contemporaneous with the publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France (beginning with Society Must Be Defended, 2003), which also take up the issue of the “will to know” within a history of truth, subjectivity, and notions and regimes of the care of the self and an aesthetics of existence. We are aware that Bersani was deeply interested in the late Foucault and came to be one of the scholars who most thoroughly took up his colleague and friend’s unfinished project of thinking “new relational modes,” organized through “bodies and pleasures” rather than social categories and identities. Of particular note, are the last lectures on “Subjectivity and Truth” (1981), where Foucault speaks about the birth of desire in late-Roman ethics. There he focuses not on the repression of desire but rather its emergence via its extraction or “unearthing” at the very root of, yet now distinct from, the bloc of aphrodisia (viz. pleasure, sex) via technologies of the self that in the sidelining of sexual acts, bodies, and pleasures created a new form: the subject of desire. Here we see not only reasons for the split between Foucault and Deleuze over pleasure and desire, respectively, but also the difference between Foucault and Judith Butler, and the subsequent influence that the latter’s work will have in shaping the field of queer theory. For as we recall, in 1984 (the year Foucault died) Butler will write her dissertation on “Subjects of Desire” (published in 1987).

10. See Dean, Beyond Sexuality; Ricco, Logic; and Ricco, Decision.

11. This brief discussion is a nod to the cosmological turn that Bersani’s thinking took in the last decade of his career, as he became increasingly interested in theories concerning such things as the origins of the universe emerging from astronomy and astrophysics. The darkness that we are speaking of here correlates with the quasars or super black holes that are at the center of each galaxy in the universe. It also correlates with the so-called “dark matter” that is believed to constitute 27 percent of the universe (with only 4.9 percent of the universe being ordinary matter); and to “dark energy” which makes up the other roughly 68 percent of the universe, and that NASA scientist Jane Rigby has described as “this weird repulsive force that is making the universe expand ever faster and faster.” For the statistics cited here, see Overbye.

12. We might find a resonance between Bersani’s observations here on perceiving darkness, and Karl Marx’s idea of seeing the future in a glass darkly, “so as” Terry Eagleton recently explains, “not to make a fetish of it.”

13. In an article in homage to the reading and writing practices of his former colleague, Caleb Smith relays that “Inside the front cover of each book from Sam’s library, a bookplate had been placed. ‘From the library of Sam See,’ it said, then quoted two lines by Sappho, in H.D.’s translation: ‘yet to sing love, / love must first shatter us.’”

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• Tiffany, Daniel. Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance. U of Chicago P, 2009.
• Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons. Duke UP, 2012.
• Younge, Gary. “Arriving Without Belonging.” The New York Review of Books, 17 August 2023, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/08/17/arriving-without-belonging-colin-grant/.

Tom Roach (bio)

Abstract

This essay argues that Bersani’s attempts to articulate a non-Cartesian form of knowledge production spur him to speculate anew about epistemology and ontology. Specifically, Bersani’s late theory and practice of recategorization, a recursive engagement with thinkers and concepts that reveals thought’s virtual potential, affords him the opportunity to conceive of a cognitive temporal unity and an immanentist conception of being. After exploring Bersani’s theory of recategorization and his textual recategorizing practice, I turn to the work of multimedia artist Juan Pablo Echeverri to offer a dialogic example of recategorization as aesthetic practice.

In a series of questions that begins the final section of “‘Ardent Masturbation’ (Descartes, Freud, Proust, et al.),” Leo Bersani asks a curious question, an ontological speculation masquerading as an epistemological inquiry: “Can thought be caressed into knowledge?” (54). Bersani asks this question after positing a spatial link between the essay’s titular thinkers. To properly think, all three more or less announce, it is necessary to shut the door to the world and retreat to a space of solitude. Indeed, in “what might broadly be called modernity” the necessary condition for a philosophical knowledge of the self is a separation from the social: “autonomous self-reflection” can only occur within an “extraordinarily active solitariness” (42, 46). Solitude is essential to modern epistemology because the world is conceived as hostile to thought. The will to self-knowledge is a similarly aggressive force. The modern epistemologist whips thought into shape first by excluding an antagonistic world, and then by making the world’s foreignness familiar via appropriation and incorporation. Cartesian epistemological autonomy is, to pick up on this special issue’s theme, profoundly antisocial: the subject assimilates the world into itself—makes it familiar, self-identical—and calls it “knowledge.”¹

This essay demonstrates how Bersani’s attempts to articulate a non-Cartesian form of knowledge production spur him to speculate anew about epistemology and ontology. Specifically, Bersani’s late theory and practice of recategorization, a recursive engagement with thinkers and concepts that reveals thought’s virtual potential, affords him the opportunity to conceive of a cognitive temporal unity and an alternative to subject/object dualism. After exploring Bersani’s theory of recategorization and his textual recategorizing practice, discovering along the way a conceptual resonance in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as a practical resonance in Michel Foucault’s late interview style, I turn to the work of multimedia artist Juan Pablo Echeverri to offer a dialogic example of recategorization as aesthetic practice. Echeverri’s work takes Bersani’s practice of recategorization to the point of subjective implosion: a mise en abyme of inaccurate self-replication and substitution that reconceives the self as fungible opacity. Ultimately, Bersani and Echeverri encourage us to ignore the desire to make the unknown known and to make the foreign familiar. Instead, they invite us to enjoy the pleasures of perpetual unfulfillment and to sync with forces and partners that valorize the becoming of being.

In “Ardent Masturbation,” Bersani wonders whether all knowledge production is necessarily antisocial in the Cartesian fashion: self-protective, self-placatory, even self-creative (Cogito ergo sum).² The essay’s title is lifted from Freud’s “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men,” in which Freud argues, according to Bersani, that onanism for such men is: a) a defensive response to being excluded from the parental dyad; b) a fantasy of mastering that dyad and the inhospitable world it represents; and c) a fantasy of parentless self-generation, perhaps the ultimate kiss-off to mom and dad. For Bersani, the term is a metaphor for the titular thinkers’ philosophical practice. The hegemonic, masturbatory model of knowledge production in modern epistemology likewise traffics in defensiveness, attempted mastery, and the immaculate conception of a (divided) self. Bersani devotes the final pages of the essay, and arguably much of his career, to seeking alternatives to this model. In asking whether thought can “caress” knowledge into being, he cheekily alludes to masturbation, but this time the sensual activity is of a different variety. Bersani seeks not only a different method for producing knowledge but also a different form of knowledge altogether: one with a syntax that is not epistemological but aesthetic and sensual; one that emerges from a correspondence between thought and thinker but belongs to neither; one that seeks not to capture the unknown but to articulate, and then articulate differently, the known unthought; one modeled not on an ego-gratifying masturbation wherein knowledge is the coaxed orgasm of thought, but, rather, a mutually caressive, mutually transformative exchange between thought and thinker, thinker and things.³ This is to say that in seeking alternatives to the dominant mode of knowledge production in modernity Bersani simultaneously seeks a non-Cartesian/non-Freudian/non-Proustian form of being.

Sort of. The thing with these three thinkers is that they say more than they know, so there is always more to say about them. In Bersani’s hands, these thinkers unwittingly and repeatedly undermine their own conceptual dualisms and antagonisms.⁴ Bersani returns to their work time and again to discover the conceptual pathways their slip-ups might reveal. Unlike, say Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault who definitively turn their backs on at least two of the titular thinkers, Bersani is, at minimum, ambivalent about letting them go. Seeing that he offers them second, third, and fourth chances, he seems committed to making the relationship work. Descartes, for example, might be the daddy of masturbatory self-analysis, the godlike creator of a world inimical to thought, but, from another perspective, he also “initiates and sustains a kind of intellectual sociability that could be thought of as superseding the solitary concentration that led to his certainties about being and the conditions of knowledge” (“Ardent” 56). Descartes’s dialogic gesture of sharing his meditations in writing, of reaching out and confiding in us, bursts, according to Bersani, his monadic bubble. In Samuel Beckett’s work, which Bersani discusses in relation to Descartes, language, even the nonsensical blather that dribbles from Beckett’s characters’ mouths, exists solely for the sake of creating an indefinitely disconnected relation wherein intersubjective fusion is always forestalled, failed. By reading Descartes through a Beckettian lens, Bersani transforms him into someone worth keeping around—at least as blathering company.

Similarly, Bersani spends a good third of “‘Ardent Masturbation’” analyzing Freud’s “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men,” and not because he is interested per se in the neurotic men of its title, who are attracted to married yet promiscuous women. Rather, Bersani digs into Freud’s work here for at least three reasons: First, the essay is an extreme, bordering on absurd, example of the masturbatory form of knowledge production that links these three thinkers; second, Freud posits masturbation as a universal paradigm of sexual desire—all desire is desire of the self, that is, narcissistic;⁵ and, third, Freud’s argumentat here is so illogical that the essay demolishes its own claims and “performs the blockages, the mergings, the incoherence inherent in the ‘discipline’ Freud invented” (53). This latter point, that the text performatively reveals the cracks in the armor of the psychoanalytic enterprise, is an indication of Bersani’s aforementioned ambivalence about leaving Freud behind. Because psychoanalytic theory “immobilizes the human subject in its persuasive demonstration of an irreducible, politically unfixable antagonism between external reality and the structures of desire” (Bersani, Homos 124), it may not be the nonmasturbatory mode of thinking Bersani seeks—but it’s at least honest enough to expose, however unwittingly, its limits.

The previous quotation, which might be read as Bersani hammering the final nail in Freud’s coffin, appears in Homos, a book published sixteen years before the essay under consideration. In the subsequent chapter of Thoughts and Things, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” published two years after “‘Ardent Masturbation,’” Bersani resurrects the very thinkers that one might logically assume are resting in peace (Descartes, Freud, and Proust). In Bersani’s final essay collection, Receptive Bodies, Freud is referenced on thirty-four of that book’s one-hundred-twenty-eight pages (Descartes, nine; Proust, six). All of which leads me to ask: Am I the only reader who experienced confusion, if not frustration, when Freud repeatedly reared his head in Bersani’s work after Homos? Because the stunning concluding chapter of that book is, at least in part, a eulogy for a Freudian “sexuality of profundity” (123)—not to mention a calling out of psychoanalytic ideological critique as “inescapably conservative” (124) and hence politically moribund—is my frustration justified, or at least shared? I, for one, was thrilled to see Georg Simmel appear as a new interlocutor in the first paragraph of 2002’s “Cruising and Sociability.” But Freud soon arrives, crashes the party, and dominates a conversation that up to that point had been pleasantly flighty and promiscuously chatty. In the years since, I may or may not have screamed, “Let Freud go! Look elsewhere!” more than once to the Bersani-in-my-head. Now in 2024, as we approach the two-year anniversary of Bersani’s death and assess the “afterlife” of a concept with which he is (rather unfortunately) associated, it seems salient to ask: Why did Bersani continuously loop back to thinkers that might no longer have served his intellectual project? If, after Homos, that intellectual project evolved into an exploration of nonmasturbatory forms of knowledge production and nondestructive ways of being in, and with, the world, why did he not turn directly to the work of Spinoza, Wittgenstein, or Merleau-Ponty, whom he names in the concluding section of “‘Ardent Masturbation’” as the philosophers who “propose versions of being as mobilized and continuously modified through exchanges that collapse the subject-object dualism” (56)? Are Bersani’s repeated returns to the work of Descartes, Freud, Proust, et al. motivated by a Berlantian cruel optimism that promises a definitive clarification of their conceptual enigmas? Or are they a Beckettian experiment in failing better, a discursive performance of an “indefinitely postponed … unprecedented climax” (57)? Indeed, are these frustrating and frustrated reengagements the means by which Bersani caresses thought into knowledge?

Thankfully, I’m not the only one with questions of this sort. In the interview, “Rigorously Speculating,” Mikko Tuhkanen asks Bersani about his recurring engagements with certain thinkers. Bersani’s answer to a query about the preface to the second edition of Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art is telling:

I think it’s a good analysis of Proust, but in a way it could be, to use a term that’s become important to me, recategorized—and in a way this is precisely what I have been doing in my subsequent work. The subsequent psychoanalytic references add to the original reading, enrich it in a way, and also make it a little more precise, or more expansive. It’s as if later versions of certain thoughts keep spiraling out with new additions. It’s a strange relation of undoing but not quite undoing what you’ve thought; it’s supplementing, it’s additive in a way. … People have said to me, ‘You already said that twenty years ago.’ Well, fine. That simply means that it was an important idea and it’s remained an important idea but I found ways to recategorize it, to play with it in a different way, adding something, changing something. I think that’s all very important.

(294)

Aside from making me feel sheepish about being one of those people who snootily critique Bersani for repeating himself, this passage—specifically, the concept of recategorization—illuminates Bersani’s method of caressing thought into knowledge and, quite relatedly, hints at both the movement and the temporality of thought and being.⁶

Recategorization is neither revision nor critique; it is the becoming of a concept, the unfolding and reemergence of an intuition in a form that is essentially the same but slightly unfamiliar. The inherent difference of a concept becomes accessible over time; in this sense, concepts are future strangers. This strangeness is precisely their potential: their inherent incompleteness that unfolds into an open-ended problematic, their potential to renew their potential, to repotentiate. One should not treat these guests as “food for thought” to be consumed, digested, excreted, and flushed. Rather, concepts are deserving of our hospitality and humility; they are to be treated as welcome foreigners and granted permanent residency. Distinguishing critique from Bersani’s speculative approach to knowledge, Tuhkanen writes: “In contrast to a ‘speculative’ approach, a ‘critique’ assumes that the reader has ‘understood’—and, consequently, finished with—the text, precisely the attitude of epistemological annihilation, typical to Western modernity, that Bersani seeks to displace” (Speculative 16). Recategorization is one feature of Bersani’s speculative approach, his attempt to produce a nonmasturbatory, nonappropriative method of knowledge production. In employing it, he demonstrates that the relationship between thought and thinker is not defined by dominance and submission, or even competition, but hospitality.

Bersani is not alone on his quest to find alternatives to “the attitude of epistemological annihilation” copped by Descartes and other modern dialecticians. In What is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari likewise seek alternatives to what Tuhkanen calls the “epistemophilic regime” (Speculative 43). Their pursuit entails an examination of a thinker’s “conceptual personae,” which they define as the “true agents of enunciation” through which the thinker thinks—”the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae” (Deleuze and Guattari 65). These conceptual figures determine the form of knowledge produced, the relation between thought and thinker, and, ultimately, the limits of the thinkable within any system of thought. Unlike Bersani, who is quite generous in his rendering of Descartes’s method, Deleuze and Guattari dismissively identify the conceptual persona of Descartes’s cogito as The Idiot, “the private thinker [who] forms a concept with innate forces that everyone possesses on their own account by right (‘I think’)” (62). Unlike Bersani, they summarily turn their backs on Descartes and look elsewhere. Their first consideration of non-idiotic personae is The Friend, the etymological bedrock of Greek philosophers: “the friends of wisdom, those who seek wisdom but do not formally possess it” (3). They ponder the usefulness of the Greek friend as a figure for thought, but soon realize that, like Bersani’s solitary masturbator, it carries a lot of baggage: the Greeks “violently force” it into a relationship with Platonic Essence, and, later, wisdom and truth (3); they compel it into competition in the agon, wherein friends become rivals and claimants; they even coerce it into the conceptual blueprint of cities and societies (democracy, for example) (4). Is this too much to ask of The Friend? Has Greek philosophy overburdened and exhausted The Friend? Perhaps, Deleuze and Guattari speculate, the only way to invigorate The Friend is to “recategorize” it. Although they do not use Bersani’s term, their discussion of what might need to happen in order for The Friend to become viable again as a conceptual persona for thought bears resemblance to Bersani’s method:

Unless we are led back to the “Friend,” but after an ordeal that is too powerful, an inexpressible catastrophe, and so in yet another new sense, in a mutual distress, a mutual weariness that forms a new right of thought (Socrates becomes Jewish). Not two friends who communicate and recall the past together but, on the contrary, who suffer an amnesia or aphasia capable of splitting thought, of dividing it in itself. Personae proliferate and branch off, jostle one another and replace each other.⁷

(71)

Only by branching off in new directions and jostling with other versions of itself can The Friend repotentiate and revivify. Like Freudian and Proustian problematics in Bersani’s work, The Friend must return as an inaccurate replication of itself in order to be viable for philosophy again.

Michel Foucault also accompanies Bersani in his quest for anti-epistemophilic methods and knowledges. Foucault, however, uses the interview format to recategorize his previous ideas. As I have previously argued, rather than allowing interlocutors to interpellate him into a dialogic exchange of critique and defense, point and counterpoint, Foucault opts to extend his ideas in new directions in his late interviews.⁸ Refusing to remain locked within the discursive rules of Socratic dialogue, he strategically disengages from dialectical exchange and steers the conversation toward new conceptual developments. One can see here the outline of a larger political project beyond dialectics—a strategy that couples exodus with invention, defection with creation. Foucault betrays the conventions of intersubjective dialogue to open up a space for both new conceptual forms and new ways of relating. His interview strategy thus syncs with Bersani’s practice of recategorization. Bersani revisits concepts and thinkers because they “keep spiraling out with new additions,” not because he feels compelled to correct, defend, or have the final word on his previous analyses. That “final word” is itself a teleological fantasy; Bersani’s conclusions are infinitely forestalled because open-ended problematics are unsublatable within a dialectical schematic. Like Foucault, Bersani chooses to let his ideas swerve from a determinate course so that they might repotentiate and reveal themselves as future strangers.⁹

Put another way, Bersani’s recategorized concepts exist alongside earlier articulations as actualizations of a concept’s virtuality. A theory of virtuality is pivotal in Bersani’s late work because it affords him the opportunity to conceive of a cognitive temporal unity and an alternative to subject/object dualism. In “Re-perusal, Registered,” he describes the nondialectical movement and anticausal temporality of thought as follows: “positing the futurity of our past thinking breaks down the temporality we usually assign to mental life and points to the oneness, the persisting presentness, of all thought” (275). The temporal order “we usually assign to mental life” is that of a detective narrative, wherein intellectual discoveries lead to an unshakeable truth.¹⁰ The skilled sleuth who pores over clues that eventually solve the crime wrangles the time of thought into a teleological trajectory. Thought is useful here insofar as it serves the telos: everything in this narrative points toward the big reveal, the synthesis of intellectual labor. The tense of this cognitive quest is the future perfect: each clue’s meaning only makes sense in retrospect, in the time of the “will have been,” when connections between clues are discovered.¹¹ The final truth, then, sublates and hence annihilates each intellectual discovery; similarly, the time of intellectual labor condenses into a single, futural moment. By insisting on the “persisting presentness” of thought, Bersani by contrast posits a nonnarrative temporality for mental life, wherein ideas occur as singular events inassimilable to a dialectical schematic. Rather than developing along a tidy chronological trajectory of cause and effect, thoughts emerge and move in a more haphazard, itinerant form.¹² In Bersani’s words,

the spiraling of mental time into ever widening plateaus of experience at once repeated and revised establishes a continuity between past and present wholly unlike the discontinuous suppressions of present time by the temporal hallucinations of involuntary memory. Nothing is lost but nothing is ever the same. Each present is an inaccurate replication—or, as I now like to call it, a re-categorizing—of all our pasts.

(Marcel Proust xi-xii)

Because there is temporal continuity in the psyche, thought comprises reconfigured pasts emerging in the present—the virtual present is simultaneously the future stranger. Because thought is inherently different to itself, it can never be fully realized: thought advances in a series toward a climax that never comes. If the unconscious of thought is persistently present in the psyche, then the big reveal is indefinitely forestalled; the virtual potential of a concept is a pressure continually exerted over time and through various articulations. Recategorization respects and enacts the unstoppable becoming of the virtual. It illuminates an aspect of a concept that was always already there: an unnoticed yet ever-present inherent difference. Once again, in Bersani’s words, recategorization “moves the argument forward by inaccurately replicating it” (Thoughts 73).¹³

In this psychic topography, however, a forward advance is indistinguishable from a backward loop. Unconscious virtuality presents thought with a syntax different from an epistemophilic will to know. If the latter operates according to an imperialistic set of rules urging us to “dig deep” in order to “gain” knowledge (by making it personal property) and eliminate foreignness (by making it familiar), the former adheres to aesthetic guidelines that encourage speculation, experimentation, and the creation of open-ended problematics. The knowledge emergent in Cartesian epistemological pursuits is an entrapment of thought, a deadening of its potential. Thinking in the speculative mode honors thought’s virtual unconscious: its inherent difference, its restless becoming. Virtuality is comprehensible as a syntax of the psyche only if the unconscious is perceived as both unknowable and, in Christopher Bollas’s phrasing, as consisting of “unthought knowns” (qtd. in Tuhkanen, Speculative 193). Bersani urges us to understand the unconscious “not as a reservoir of repressed representations and impulses that aim to block the realization of our conscious projects but … as the original reservoir of psychic virtualities” (Thoughts 67). Put differently, the unconscious has been misrecognized as a threatening and antagonistic other, when in fact it might be nothing to fear: it is not a storehouse of repressed memories and traumas, but the virtual presentness of thought. In this rendering of the unconscious, the psychoanalytic will to know, the desire to scour the depths of the unconscious to unearth its ever-elusive secrets, is the real monster.

The speculative practice of recategorization likewise enacts a key Bersanian ontological claim: that the divided self, the sine qua non of masturbatory self-analysis, including Freudian psychoanalysis, is actually an immanentist conception of being misrecognized. Recategorization as a critical method—and, importantly, as an aesthetic practice, a way of life—is attuned to the temporality and mobility of thought and being. Put succinctly, it is attuned to ontology: the thought of being. Bersani gives shape to this time and movement with the figure of the spiral: “we might think of mental time as a spiraling movement rather than a linear trajectory that leaves its past behind. … [M]oving forward is indistinguishable from a relooping movement backward” (69). By relooping, thoughts develop serially and extensibly: they are inaccurately replicated as they wreathe forward and backward toward new connections. The unconscious past puts pressure on present consciousness to unmoor thought from itself, to open up a space for it to become something different. In this sense, the virtual is the present’s present: a gift that keeps on giving, a mutual caress between psychic temporalities, an inexhaustible intangibility impossible to capture or possess. The past, indeed, is never erased, as Freud contends, but it is also not repressed. It is looped back into the present as virtual becoming. This looping is not an eruptive twist on a narrative trajectory that moves toward climax, but a looping between temporalities that fit incongruously within each other. The syntax of the movement between past and present, and between the unconscious and consciousness, is, in John Paul Ricco’s words, an “incongruous oneness.”¹⁴ Incongruity here is crucial to thought’s becoming because it unglues established knowledge from its potential; incongruity creates a space of freedom to become whatever. “Having ceased to be,” Bersani writes, “thought will ceaselessly begin to be. The present contains the virtualized future of our past” (75). Recategorization is thinking in the aesthetic mode because it is a sculpting and re-sculpting of thought’s potential. It is likewise, according to Tuhkanen, anamnetic: “a going-back-over, a return to something in the unactualized past that does not let go, something that demands one to revisit the missed scene of origination” (Speculative 206). If the epistemophilic syntax orients the thinker to march militantly toward the world to territorialize and conquer it by means of knowledge, the syntax of virtuality orients the thinker to waltz with the world and its inhabitants, to sync with forces and partners that valorize the becoming of being between them. To return to the quotation that begins this essay, when the thinker learns to caress thought into knowledge, their connection to the world takes the form of a mutual caress of potentiality.

“Quoting ourselves,” Bersani remarks in “Staring,” the final essay in his final essay collection, “far from being an enslavement to our past, creates what may be the only free relation we can have to our past: the freedom of continually repeating its intrinsic inconclusiveness” (Receptive 126). Immediately following this statement, Bersani quotes himself. He reiterates a few of his essays’ hallmark opening zingers (the most provocative, perhaps, the first sentence of “Merde Alors,” co-authored with Ulysse Dutoit: “The vagina is a logical defect in nature.” [128]) to set the stage for another recategorization. Bersani’s incendiary, sometimes outlandish, introductory sentences, become, in their recategorized form, empty seductions. By calling an inordinate amount of attention to themselves, they “defeat from the very start, our impatient wish to move ahead toward de-problematizing conclusions” (128). These opening zingers are simply too outrageous to be declarations for “serious” knowledge pursuits—those that seek conclusive truths, those for which knowledge is property. Rather, Bersani’s openers are self-contained, diversionary pleasures. They provoke an intellectual tension that never resolves; they flamboyantly introduce an argumentative enigma that turns out to be a red herring. Or, in Bersani’s words: “They caressingly dismiss the reader’s conceptual receptiveness” (128; my emphasis). As it turns out, at least in this late recategorization of his thought, Bersani has long been, most likely before he even knew it, inviting us to caress thought into knowledge with him. Through first sentences that suck all the air out of a text, he lovingly yet teasingly lures readers into his anti-epistemophilic practice of critical swerving. He explains that these sentences are likewise “pauses” that serve as “models for occasional restful stops in the agitated questioning of inconclusive thinking and of inconclusive being” (128). As self-contained and satisfying art objects in and of themselves, they invite us to ignore the desire to make the unknown known, to solve the mystery. As aesthetic diversions that fail to lead us toward a climax, they invite us, instead, to enjoy the pleasures of perpetual unfulfillment.

Recategorization as a critical practice allows thought to undo and reorient itself as it progresses serially toward indefinitely forestalled conclusions. It is thus an additive process of unbecoming and metamorphosis that expresses an inexhaustibly renewable exchange between the past and present, between the unconscious and consciousness, and, ultimately, between being and becoming. At the risk of literalizing Bersani’s critical method, I turn now to the work of Colombian artist Juan Pablo Echeverri (1978-2022) to speculate about recategorization as an aesthetic practice, a mode of being. Echeverri’s work, particularly his signature piece, miss fotojapón, instantiates Bersani’s critical practice as photographic spectacle. Comprised of thousands of 4×5cm passport-size self-portraits taken daily between the years 1998 and 2022, miss fotojapón represents the self as a series of inaccurately replicated forms looping haphazardly between temporalities (fig. 1).

Fig 1. Juan Pablo Echeverri, miss fotojapón, 1998-2022 (selection), passport photos, inkjet prints, 4 × 5 cm each. © Juan Pablo Echeverri. Courtesy of the Juan Pablo Echeverri Estate. https://www.juanpabloecheverri.com

Echeverri describes the motivation for the project as follows:

I was around 17 at the time [1995] and had just started experimenting with my appearance with different piercings and hairstyles; I thought it would be nice to have some documentation of these experiments for the future. As a way of accompanying my written diary with images, I began to sporadically visit the photo booth around 1995. The more I physically changed, the more I wanted to take pictures; and the more pictures I took, the more I instigated these changes. This cycle eventually resulted in me taking a photograph on a daily basis beginning in June 2000.

(“All”)

“Foto Japon” is the brand name of the photobooth Echeverri frequented in his adolescence. The titular “miss” is, perhaps, then, a cheeky, gender-bending reference to the artist himself (as in, “I am Miss Fotojapón”). Unabashedly even confrontationally queer-identified both in life and art, Echeverri frequently plays with gender expression in his work.¹⁵ That “miss,” however, might also be interpreted as an experience of longing, “(I) miss Fotojapón.” Given that the series is a collection of passport photos, and that the nation “Japan” is in its title, “miss” could signify an ache for a once- or never-visited nation, even a desire to escape one’s native country. In this sense, “missing” might also be a retroactive longing for a period in the artist’s adolescence when a photobooth afforded an opportunity for self-experimentation: a “safe space” away from the social in which new selves are nurtured. One way or another, the photobooth, although initially used as a tool to document experiments in self-styling, becomes the instigator for continual self-experimentation. The line between life and art eventually becomes indistinguishable; Echeverri poses for a camera that records extant appearances and shapes future ones. Self-transformation and journalistic documentation merge here into a life practice. When the portraits are viewed in a grid-like formation, Echeverri’s preferred way of exhibiting the piece, the variability in self-appearance is dizzying; indeed, it is difficult to comprehend that the vast, superficial differences among the sublime number of represented selves cohere in one individual.

But what type of subject is represented here? Although miss fotojapón is a daily documentation of Echeverri’s changing visage, the photographic subject of this series does not develop along a traditional life trajectory: there is no cause and effect and no climax, only self-extensions spiraling between past, present, and future. In a statement that can only be described as cosmically narcissistic, Echeverri writes: “I like to refer to the fantasies that surround ‘being,’ stretching the idea of the ‘self’ and creating a universe in which I am the common denominator” (“All”). The artist’s initial desire to use photography to preserve memory is, in the end, thwarted. In the grid, the past is not quarantined as a deadened known but instead reloops into future versions of a self. A moustache here emerges in a new form there, a facial piercing shifts from eyebrow to ear. This serialized self unbecomes and transforms as it spirals through time and multiplies. Although obvious differences appear in the aging face, moving forward in time seems indistinguishable from moving backward. Each version of this self is a singular event, each stacked side by side, piling up horizontally and vertically, in a nonteleological, nonlinear chronology. Newer selves are neither replacements of nor improvements on previous versions; they are simply different installments of a self contained in the virtual future of its past. Moreover, akin to Bersani’s practice of quoting himself to the point that his ideas no longer resemble themselves, Echeverri’s cosmically narcissistic project of self-reproduction repeats the self to death: there is no “there” beneath the superficial repetition of self-stylization, no psychological interiority to reveal. The self’s inherent otherness prevents any final selfactualization, or any discovery of a “true self.” Instead, incongruous selves perpetually fail to cohere in a psychological subject. By recategorizing the psychological subject as a series of superficial, aesthetic transformations, Echeverri offers a dizzying demonstration of being’s indefinite unfinishedness. Amid this sea of superficial difference, however, three consistencies emerge: Echeverri’s blank stare, his solitude, and the photographic genre itself—the passport photo.

Like Bersani’s opening zingers, which shock but swerve, Echeverri’s numerous, spectacular self-stylings are also empty seductions. The artist’s wide-ranging looks certainly steal the spotlight, beckoning viewers to reflect, perhaps “philosophically,” on the mutability of self-identity or the multitudes contained within, but his look itself—that is, his facial expression—remains consistently affectless and inscrutable. In each photo Echeverri stares directly at the viewer with a gaze simultaneously wide-eyed and bored, confrontational and passive, fearful and confident—a deer in the headlights impossibly blasé and defiant. Likewise, his consistently pursed lips, concealing teeth and resisting both smiles and frowns, express little emotion: is he melancholy or giggly, earnest or mocking? Given that each photo in this series appears to have been taken in isolation—in a photo booth that momentarily separates the subject from the world—Echeverri’s uniformly impenetrable facial expressions bespeak the ambivalence of antisocial self-exclusion. The photographic genre Echeverri employs to document his solitude distills this ambivalence. The passport photo might signal freedom, agency, global mobility, the means of access to new opportunities and adventures; it also might be a reminder of our arbitrary imprisonment in a national identity, a reminder of the chance social determinants that immobilize and abrade, or evidence of our stuckness in a body and place we did not choose. If Echeverri dreams of a cosmopolitan life beyond the borders of his homeland, his visage does not betray such hopes. Instead, he projects a neutral blankness: an inexpressive enigma that teases psychological depth. Frustratingly, however, these self-portraits do not illuminate the secrets of any psyche. Between the emphasis on subjective surfaces (hair, skin, accessories) and the refusal to welcome us in via the eyes (those “windows of the soul”) or any other expressive entry point, Echeverri seduces us only to betray us; he gives us nothing because there is nothing except solitude. miss photojapón is Echeverri’s aesthetic experiment in antisociality born in a queer solitude self-imposed, socially determined, and existential.¹⁶ Although we might be wowed by the artist’s impressive achievements in self-styling, the multidimensional aloneness that pervades each portrait, not to mention the almost monastic discipline it took to produce the series, is, in the end, most compelling. Echeverri’s daily practice of self-exclusion creates a space not only for new aesthetic forms (various self-representations) but also for new forms of connection. The aesthetic, and ascetic, practice of self-isolation, experimentation, and documentation in miss fotojapón arguably affords the artist an opportunity to speculate about new relational modes in his other projects, specifically, his 2016series, futuroSEXtraños (fig. 2)

Fig 2. Juan Pablo Echeverri, futuroSEXtraños, 2016, 60 inkjet prints, wood frames, each 41.9 × 41.9 cm. © Juan Pablo Echeverri. Courtesy of the Juan Pablo Echeverri Estate. https://www.juanpabloecheverri.com/

“For me,” Bersani states, “solitude has always been a precondition for rethinking relationality” (“Rigorously” 282). Unlike an epistemophilic antisociality, the solitary “ardent masturbation” that results in de-problematized “truth,” aesthetic experiments in antisociality can jar us into conceiving of new forms of connectedness. Best exemplified, chez Bersani, in the work of Genet and Beckett, such experiments “might begin not actually to define new relations, but it opens up a space for them—as if we were being compelled to think with parts of the brain that, you might say, haven’t been thought with previously” (281). In a less neurological register, John Paul Ricco also details the benefits of antisocial, aesthetic experiments in queer solitude: an “ecstatic pleasure” emerging at “the juncture of the profanity and perversity of ‘being alone’ … and the non-redemptive negativity of ‘being left out’” (“Queer Solitude” 144). These benefits include being “returned to your desires in all their radicality … unencumbered by the goal of self-actualization and the need to feel included” as well as “the restoration of curiosity, questioning, and thinking—yet in non-paranoid and non-reparative ways, because, again, one is not obsessed with feeling included” (145). Embracing solitude and affirming exclusion allows us to experience an impersonal mode of being that has no stake in self-identity. Only by breaking with all familiar connections might we conceive of new ones; only by affirming the “essential solipsism of sex” (145), as Ricco puts it, can we create intimacies worthy of the designation “ethical.”

In futuroSEXtraños, Echeverri highlights sex as a site of strangeness and estrangement: the future becomes stranger via sex; lovers become strangers on account of sex; the self becomes a future stranger through sex. If Bersani seeks methods to caress thought into knowledge, to gently coax speculations into open-ended problematics that reveal their inherent strangeness over time, Echeverri implies in this series that sex makes us future strangers to ourselves and others, that sex, moreover, reveals strangers that have been, perhaps, always already there. futuroSEXtraños comprises sixty inkjet prints, each featuring a silhouetted bust of a recognizable Western cultural type: a football player, a prom queen, a metal head, a beatnik. The model for each of these figures is the artist himself, a fact which prompts some initial questions: are the figures depicted in the grid the “future strangers” that emerge within the self because of sex? Does sex prompt a recategorization of the self, an opportunity to reveal the self as a series of strangers? Given the artist’s cosmically narcissistic desire to create “a universe in which I am the common denominator,” are these figures the “unknown knowns” of the artist’s psyche, a representation of a self that is inherently different to itself? If so, how do these diverse strangers relate to one another within a subjective unity? According to Echeverri, the series was inspired by “the template images that social media use, where a silhouette appears in a square or circle, suggesting users to share their own image to ‘identify’ themselves” (“Artist’s Statement”). Exhibited in a grid-like formation, the silhouettes mimic the user interface of, for example, Grindr: the app for men-seeking-men (m4m) that set the design template for geosocial dating and hookup apps. In his artist statement for the series, Echeverri notes that the work concerns the blind trust we put in others during the virtual cruise and, more generally, the cutthroat relational norms of mediated intimacies: “how we can go from being ‘in a Relationship’ with someone to be unable to access their lives after being blocked and deleted by them, finding only these silhouettes that mean we’re not allowed in these people’s lives anymore” (“Artist’s Statement”). In this sense, hookup apps themselves are gathering spaces for future strangers. Such apps provoke intense sexual desires, fantasies, and emotional connections that, for the most part, vanish into thin air. Users narcissistically project fantasies of the ideal partner/lover onto desired others who, unable to compete with such fantasies, inevitably disappoint. Once the fantasy dissipates (due to the general fleetingness of social media connection, the consummation of desire, or even, more simply, forgetfulness or boredom) the two again become strangers. The illusion of intersubjective fusion is shattered by the disconnected connectedness inherent to these media and, ultimately, by the essential solipsism of sexual desire itself.

And yet, amid their estrangement these diverse subjective forms connect; they mis-fit together in a grid that formally emphasizes their sameness. However different their look (hair, pose, accessories), the grid gathers them into an aesthetic collection that creates likenesses and correspondences between seemingly incompatible types. Although the distinctness of the individual silhouettes is noteworthy, the grid flattens these figures into an arrangement emphasizing similitude. In this collection, sameness is the structuring framework through which difference manifests. Diverse cultural types are made generically uniform by the silhouette, but they refuse to be identical: they are alike in form and singular in content. Not unlike Warhol’s famous soup cans, these avatars are essentially the same but superficially unique. And yet, even this “uniqueness” is superfluous: the superficial spectacle of commodified individuality reduces, finally, to blankness. Formal similitude dissolves individuality and cultural stereotype effaces psychological interiority. These unique yet generic types are invariably hollowed out; they are flattened and essentially interchangeable with another. Put another way, Echeverri’s grid of blank, clichéd cultural types visualizes a community founded in fungibility. As I have argued elsewhere, fungibility is a relational model that defies intersubjective, psychological, sexual, and neoliberal relational norms.¹⁷ An ethics of fungibility deemphasizes psychic interiority: diverse subjective types correspond at the level of likeness because they renounce self-ownership. These types mingle impersonally, interchangeably, seeking not to solve the enigma of the other nor to incorporate a threatening otherness into the self. Rather, they seek in the other the unknown knowns of the self—or, using Echeverri’s words, they seek the opportunity to become a future stranger to oneself.

By committing to an antisocial, arguably masturbatory practice of photographic self-reproduction, Echeverri visualizes a recategorized self born in queer solitude—a self that reveals strange, inherent features as it loops between temporalities. This self loses and transforms itself in serialization: it unbecomes, regroups, and inaccurately replicates in a movement of unfinished virtuality. In the process of self-recategorization, all sense of propriety is lost; indeed, self-recategorization is anathema to ownership because it de-subjectifies and de-privatizes the subject in generic serialization. “If we were ever to create a community in which property relations are not the defining factor,” Bersani speculates, “we have to first reconceive erotics” (Homos 128). Echeverri’s ascetic practice of self-recategorization in miss photojapón is the precondition for his positing of a radically impersonal mode of erotic relationality in futuroSEXtraños—his attempt to envision an erotics and a community contemptuous of property relations. In the essential solipsism of sex, in its ontologically disconnected connectedness, Echeverri locates an anti-intersubjective ethics of fungibility. In his community of diverse types—each singular and clichéd, precious and insignificant—blank forms correspond in a dance of fungible equivalence. Difference here is nothing to fear; it is folded into the likeness of form (the rectangle, the silhouette) and the geometry of assemblage (the grid). The grid determines the mode of interaction between its rectangular constituents: a oneness (at the most literal level, the one body of the artist himself) is disseminated into bounded frames that hold their content (subjective forms) at a remove. “The triangle,” Michael Snediker writes, “is a shape of melodrama to the extent that we are trained to think of its geometry in terms of competing vertices and angles; the rectangle’s corners, by contrast, ask us to think not of rivalry but of parallel surfaces and lines. … A triangle graphically corresponds to imagined hostilities whereas a rectangle waits to be filled” (174). Echeverri’s contiguous rectangles neither compete with, nor complement, each other: they are filled with fungible content, they connect at the point of separation (the line, the frame), they replicate inaccurately, differently. Separation here diagrams connection; formal correspondence traces the design of extensivity. In this community, for which “unity” is purely formal, the self finds its own blankness in nonidentical others—a blankness that is counterintuitively the fullness of its being. In the impersonal mingling of hollowed-out types, in the solipsism of sex, the self is recategorized as a future stranger. There is nothing to take away from this encounter and no knowledge to capture in this self-caress. It is merely, miraculously, a virtual present in the serial relay of ontological unbecoming and regrouping; it is merely, miraculously, the virtual present in a psychic temporality that loops haphazardly until movement, at last, stills.

Tom Roach is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Coordinator of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the Department of History, Literature, and the Arts at Bryant University. He is the author of Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (SUNY Press, 2012) and Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era (SUNY Press, 2021). Recent publications include an essay in differences on Leo Bersani’s concept of fascination and a chapter in Political Philosophies of Aging, Dying, and Death (Taylor and Francis, 2021) on the political function of death in the work of Michel Foucault.

Footnotes

I am grateful to Grace Lavery for piquing my interest in Bersani’s (Jamesian) concept of “re-perusal” in her conference presentation, “Prolapse,” at “The Afterlives of the Antisocial” symposium at UC, Irvine, on September 30, 2022. Thanks also to Mikko Tuhkanen for using his encyclopedic knowledge of Bersani oeuvre to help me locate Bersani’s varied articulations of reperusal and recategorization. Finally, I am enormously grateful to Diego Echeverri, Claudia Muñoz de Echeverri, and Marcela Echeverri for permitting me to reprint Juan Pablo Echeverri’s art and for locating Echeverri’s artist’s statement on futuroSEXtraños. I am likewise grateful to Claudia Liliana Salamanca Sanchez, Lucía Parias Rojas, and Paola Rico for putting me in touch with the artist’s estate. I dedicate this essay to the life and work of Leo Bersani (1931-2022) and Juan Pablo Echeverri (1978-2022), both of whom have inspired me in countless ways, many of which I have yet to grasp.

1. I am using the word “antisocial” here to designate a form of self-imposed isolation that disconnects the subject from a world conceived of as hostile to thought and the self. In “Against Prefaces,” the sardonic anti-preface to Thoughts and Things, Bersani designates this type of antisociality a “conquering autonomy toward which the Cartesian subject aspires” (xi). An epistemological antisociality should be distinguished from artistic experiments in antisociality in Genet, Beckett, and Todd Haynes’s Safe, to use the examples Bersani references in “Rigorously Speculating,” an interview with Mikko Tuhkanen (Bersani, “Rigorously” 280). An aesthetic encounter with antisociality “might begin not actually to define new relations, but it opens up a space for them—as if we were being compelled to think with parts of the brain that, you might say, haven’t been thought with previously” (281). Bersani is interested in artistic renderings of antisociality, as opposed to epistemological ones, because the former might jar us into thinking about new forms of connectedness—forms that bear no resemblance to familiar relational models. Regarding the “antisocial thesis,” the “afterlife” of which we are presumedly elaborating here, Bersani makes clear that he is not necessarily interested in, to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Žižek, tarrying with the negative: “Already in Homos I was trying to think of connectedness, that is trying to adapt the idea of ‘correspondences of form’ to psychic correspondences; I was thinking of homosexuality as a kind of psychic correspondence of sameness.” He adds that his application of the idea of correspondences of form to homosexuality is “somewhat unfortunate” because it is “too literal and too arbitrary” (280). This might be one reason Bersani reemphasizes the correspondence of forms in aesthetic encounters in much of his post-Homos writing (in Forms of Being, for example). Finally, Bersani is more nuanced in his rendering of the Cartesian will-to-knowledge than I am painting him to be here. In “Re-perusal, Registered,” for example, he writes: “The Cartesian prioritizing of knowledge is not a simple will to know; the very pursuit of knowledge is stalled, or at least complicated, by the mind revealing itself as a secret object to itself” (275).

2. In “Rigorously Speculating,” Bersani tells Mikko Tuhkanen that the essay concerns “the epistemological hegemony in our culture … [and] the priority given to epistemology in modern philosophy.” He continues: “And I think that’s what Foucault is arguing against when he talks about ‘the Cartesian moment’: it’s a moment when ‘knowledge’ replaces ‘being,’ to put it very schematically. In intimate relations, this knowledge is connected to everything that’s important in both Proust and Freud” (284). Later in the interview, when discussing the idea of aesthetic virtuality, he remarks: “I mean, the negative words in all of this are ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ obviously …” (286).

3. Here I am glossing Mikko Tuhkanen’s analysis of the virtual unconscious in Bersani’s work, which I discuss in detail later in the essay. Moreover, the term “known unthought” is a riff on Christopher Bollas’s “unthought knowns,” also encountered in Tuhkanen’s work and also discussed in detail later in the essay. See Tuhkanen, Speculative 193-200.

4. In “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” Bersani provides an example of Freud’s knack for undoing his own claims. Bersani finds evidence of the virtual unconscious in Freud’s repeated failures to pictorialize the relationship between past and present in the psyche. To illustrate that the psychic past is never erased, Freud makes an analogy to Rome, noting how it too contains its past in (alongside) its present. This analogy hits a brick wall (for reasons that are not necessary to detail here), so Freud seeks another pictorial analogy in human aging and development. This one too fails to capture the relationship between the psychic past and present, prompting Freud to concede that he cannot illustrate his claim through pictorial representation. Bersani writes:

Realizing that the comparison with Rome is leading him astray, Freud renounces it (but, typically, doesn’t erase it), concluding that psychic time can’t be represented in pictorial terms. But, as we have seen, the analogy does in fact work, just not in the way Freud intended. Interestingly, though it is ostensibly abandoned, the analogy seems to have a force of its own, redirecting the argument rather than merely illustrating it. It moves the argument forward by inaccurately replicating it.

(73)

I discuss the movement of inaccurate replication in thought in the context of recategorization below.

5. Bersani summarizes this point succinctly in “Rigorously Speculating”: “Fundamentally, in Proust and Freud, desire is narcissistic” (284).

6. I am indebted to Mikko Tuhkanen for helping me understand the centrality of recategorization to Bersani’s work. See his elaborations of recategorization in Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction, especially, “Introduction” and “The Virtual Unconscious.”

7. I unpack this quotation in Friendship as a Way of Life:

The problem for philosophy in modernity, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is that the classical claimant/rival conception of friendship can no longer be the conceptual persona of thought, for two reasons: First, powerful rivals have emerged in the forces of advertising and marketing—the new “idea men” of our time—transforming friendship’s relation to thought and putting philosophy to work in the service of capital; second, after the “inexpressible catastrophe” of modernity (in historical terms, the atrocities committed under totalitarianism, the Holocaust, Stalinism; in philosophical terms, the Heideggerian mistake of confusing the Nazis for the Greeks), the friend as conceptual persona of philosophy has changed irrevocably. Homosocialized, commodified, and rendered fascistic, classical conceptions of friendship have become disgraceful and untrustworthy.

(60-1)

8. See Roach, Friendship (87). For examples of Foucault’s “recategorizing” practice in interviews, see “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act” and “Sex Power, and the Politics of Identity” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Volume One: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (141-156; 163-174).

9. Mikko Tuhkanen names Bersani’s critical method a “method of swerving” and proposes that this method, not the investigations into sexuality, makes Bersani a queer theorist: “As opposed to criticism aiming at the ‘annihilating elucidation’ of the object, what we have here is the kind of tortuous movement that the term’s etymology—from the Latin torquere—suggests: a digressive, transversal dance of desire that is not impelled by the need to assimilate an established choreography but moves for the mere pleasure of soliciting company, of crossing a line” (Queer 16). This critical method, per Tuhkanen, also implies an anti-intersubjective, queer ethics. Swerving is “a name he [Bersani] gives to the possibility of a nonsadistic, nonannihilative relation to otherness, the possibility that our fascinations remain with the purely enigmatic, that they not turn into paranoid investigations of the other’s secret jouissance” (14).

10. Mikko Tuhkanen also uses the detective genre to narrativize the constitution of the Laplanchean psychoanalytic subject. The enigmatic call of the Other entices this subject, who feels compelled to decipher the mysterious messages. The subject believes the Other contains secrets that are crucial to the subject’s self-understanding, even, paranoically, that the Other has “stolen” something from the subject (castrated the subject) that must be repossessed. Tuhkanen writes: “The castrated being’s relation to the world is that of a detective trying to solve the crime of which he is the victim. It is my awakening to the theft—the sense that something (I do not exactly know what) has been taken from me—that renders me a subject and everyone else a potential criminal. My startled coming-to-consciousness of my privation constitutes my subjectivation” (Speculative 215). In this rendering, the subject’s relationship to the Other is “marked by aggrievance, aggression, and suspicion” (215); its relationship to the world is “epistemophilic” because knowing, understanding—and hence destroying—the world’s mysteries is this subject’s primary motivation, its raison d’être (216).

11. Continuing with the detective genre analogy, Tuhkanen argues that the future perfect “orients the story’s disjointed materials into a narrative whose denouement, as in a good murder mystery, reveals the function of the seemingly random clues—including the red herrings—that have puzzled the reader” (Queer 11).

12. Tuhkanen notes that Bersani claims that drives, thoughts, and attention spans have a “natural tendency to swerve” (Queer 14). Bersani’s critical method of swerving—a method that seeks not to solve a text’s riddle or discover its “true” meaning—requires a digressive attention span that wanders promiscuously over a text’s surface and cares little for any significance that might lie “behind” or “beneath” it. For Tuhkanen, this critical method opens onto an ethical practice: a “swerving” connection to Otherness Bersani designates “sociability.” According to Tuhkanen,

The swerving movement of nonannihilative desire reformulates the subject’s relation to otherness in terms of what Bersani frequently calls “sociability,” a mode of connectedness among whose practitioners he counts Mallarmé, James, Almodóvar, Socrates, Foucault, Beckett, and cruisy gay men. When Bersani writes that sociability is ‘a form of relationality uncontamined by desire’ (IRG 45), the term ‘desire’ indexes the annihilative, totalizing movement of Hegelian becoming and its attempted reformulation by Laplanche as the enigmatic signifier. Sociability is nondesiring insofar as it is not a response, or a corrective, to a perceived lack as (a) being’s essence.

(16)

13. Specifically, this is a reference to Freud’s “recategorization” of his pictorial representations of the relationship between past and present. See note five for details.

14. I am grateful to John Paul Ricco for this insight. His conference presentation, “Incongruity,” at “The Afterlives of the Antisocial” symposium at UC, Irvine, alerted me to the importance of incongruity to Bersani’s conception of thought and being. See Ricco’s essay, “Incongruity,” in the special issue of differences, “Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani.

15. See, for example, Ojo de Loca (2006), diva’s Life (2006-07), and boYOs (2009), all available at the artist’s website, juanpabloecheverri.com.

16. I borrow the term “queer solitude” from John Paul Ricco, whose essay, “Queer Solitude: Dean Sameshima’s being alone,” I discuss in the following paragraph.

17. My 2021 book, Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era, attempts to tease out the ethical potential of fungibility. futuroSEXtraños is the cover image for that book.

Works Cited

• Bersani, Leo. “Cruising and Sociability.” Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays, U of Chicago P, 2010, pp. 45-62.
• –––. Homos. Harvard UP, 1995.
• –––. Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2013.
• –––. “Merde Alors.” Receptive Bodies, U of Chicago P, 2018, pp. 1-19.
• –––. Receptive Bodies. U of Chicago P, 2018.
• –––. “Re-Perusal, Registered.” The Henry James Review, vol. 32, no. 3, 2011, pp. 274-80.
• –––. “Rigorously Speculating: An Interview with Leo Bersani.” Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond, edited by Mikko Tuhkanen, SUNY P, 2014, pp. 279-96.
• –––. Thoughts and Things. U of Chicago P, 2015.
• Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. Bloomsbury, 2004.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell III, Columbia UP, 1994.
• Echeverri, Juan Pablo. “All of My Work Has Been Self-Portraits for the Last 22 Years.” Juan Pablo Echeverri, https://www.juanpabloecheverri.com/artiststatement.
• –––. “Artist’s Statement for futuroSEXtraños.” EVA International, 14 April 2018–8 July 2018, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland.
• Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley, et al., The New Press, 1997.
• Lavery, Grace. “Prolapse.” The Afterlives of the Antisocial Conference, 30 September 2022, University of California, Irvine, CA.
• Ricco, John Paul. “Incongruity.” The Afterlives of the Antisocial Conference, 30 September 2022, University of California, Irvine, CA.
• Ricco, John Paul. “Incongruity.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 156–64.
• –––. “Queer Solitude: Dean Sameshima’s being alone.” A/R art-recherche, no. 4, 2021, pp. 144-45.
• Roach, Tom. Friendship As a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement. SUNY P, 2012.
• –––. Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. SUNY P, 2021.
• Snediker, Michael. “Is the Rectangle a Grave?” Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond, edited by Mikko Tuhkanen, SUNY P, 2014, pp. 169-90.
• Tuhkanen, Mikko. Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction. Bloomsbury, 2020.
• –––, editor. Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond. SUNY P, 2014.

Mikko Tuhkanen (bio)

Abstract

This essay identifies two modes of “escape” in the “gay fugues” of Pet Shop Boys, differentiated by their (non)fascist potential. To trace this potential, the essay engages the work of Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, and Ernesto Laclau, while extracting further lessons from Stefan Zweig, Village People, Russian history, Fourierism, AIDS eulogies, West Side Story, and the mathematics of zero.

For Austin James Crews, an escape artist

… I bolted through a closing door …

– Pet Shop Boys, “Being boring”

In its eight verses and a chorus, “Wiedersehen” captures the mood of the celebrated Austrian author Stefan Zweig’s departure from Salzburg, his hometown of fifteen years. Zweig left soon after the Nazis had consolidated their power in the neighboring Germany with Adolf Hitler’s appointment as the country’s Chancellor in January 1933. In the song, he bids “farewell to the mountains,” “the trees,” and “the ski slopes” of his longtime home; the devastated man has packed his books and sold his paintings. Having finished the necessary tasks, he says goodbye to the friendly, tearful women in the village, while facing the gardener who, perhaps emboldened by the surging antisemitism, looks at him “with suspicion in his eyes.” The departure is now imminent: “The train is on the platform / the knife is in your back.”

The song by Pet Shop Boys reflects the stupefied surprise at the ascent of fascism that Zweig recounts in The World of Yesterday (1942). The memoir registers a generation’s disbelief that Enlightenment Europe, full of hope for an ever-brighter future—”There was progress everywhere” (Zweig, World 216)—could degenerate into the murderous totalitarianism of the Nazi regime. In breathtaking peripety, modernity, as Neil Tennant sings, “bore the angry children / who only saw extremes.”

Zweig recalls his own mood as he turned fifty in 1931, some two years before German and Austrian intellectuals finally began to regard Hitler as something more than a tasteless joke:

Zweig’s grumblings about his staid life—Do I want to live in this boring world?—sound like all ill-advised wishes in fairytales. Incipit Hitler, and the author gets what he wants: in three years he will be forced to leave Salzburg, “the knife in his back.” He becomes “a stateless expatriate,” “a condition,” as he writes, “hard to explain to anyone who has not known it himself. It is a nerve-racking sense of teetering on the brink, wide awake and staring into nothing, knowing that wherever you find a foothold you can be thrust back into the void at any moment” (417). His will be a life lived “in a temporary rather than a permanent mode” (418). In escaping Salzburg, he begins his search for a world that would match up with his European yesterday.

The story is melancholic not only in its tone but also because we know that the escape—like Walter Benjamin’s doomed flight from Germany in September 1940—will end in the escapees’ suicide: Zweig and his wife, Lotte, despairing of the world, will die of an intentional barbiturate overdose in Petrópolis, Brazil in February 1942. Seeking that which was presumably lost with the fascists’ rise, Zweig ultimately finds disillusionment in Brazil, his purported “land of the future.” This makes him an exemplary subject for a Pet Shop Boys song. Retrospectively told, his trajectory—his zeal for the New World, followed by disappointment—resonates with the by-now familiar Stimmung of the band: pop passion supplemented by a recognition of the impossible odds ahead, “great enthusiasm intertwined with a great sense of loss,” as Andrew Sullivan puts it in an interview with Tennant. Zweig’s story of flight is one of many in the PSB catalogue. “There is a huge thing about escaping in our songs,” says Tennant (“West End”); many of them are about fugitivity.1 Yet such flight dreams entail the unforeseeability of their trajectories. We learned a lesson from the twentieth century: dreamworlds often metamorphose into catastrophes (Buck-Morss).

While Stan Hawkins writes that the band’s music “provides a gateway from the here-and-now into the utopian domain of that-which-might-be” (43), what I propose we call their “escape anthems”—which are often “gay fugues”—indicate the need for further disambiguation. Such disambiguation concerns our thinking about the “zero” that, as the first song on the band’s first album suggests, grounds dreams of leaving. In “Two divided by zero,” the narrator tells his friend or lover that they should “not go home” but “catch the late train,” leaving in the night for a place that, later in the song, is specified as New York City. “Let’s run away,” he urges the silent interlocutor:

Tomorrow morning
we'll be miles away
on another continent
and another day

Such seemingly utopian sentiments are occasionally shared by Leo Bersani, who admonishes us to tap into our potential for “simply disappear[ing]” from the self sedimented in toxic encounters, for “simply leav[ing] the family tragedy” in which the queer kids, from Astyanax onward, find their futures written (Bersani, Thoughts 35, 13). When, in 2015, he urges us to abandon the scene of our subjection, he is channeling his impatience, in Homos (1995), the presumed locus classicus of queer antisocial thought, with the program of dialectical negotiations that by then—after Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)—had come to seem the only available practice of freedom in the landscape where we are always already “subjects” in Michel Foucault’s and Louis Althusser’s double sense (Foucault 1:60; Althusser 182). Bersani is a thinker of departures: let’s not resignify, he says—let’s run away. Yet he would also understand the darkness that, in “Two divided by zero,” accompanies the “rush of excitement” at the thought of escape: “At the same time,” Tennant says, “you know that there’s no way the people in the song are really going to end up in New York” (“Two”). If endings do come, we end up somewhere but not in the imagined telos of our dreams. Subsequent songs in the catalogue suggest that the heady flight may shift into the scene, observed in “King’s Cross,” of the uprooted “linger[ing] by the fly poster for a fight / It’s the same story every night.” Such a dark tenor always supplements the band’s alleged “queer utopianism” (Hawkins 42).

If Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe open their oeuvre by thinking the zero, in his recent work Lee Edelman considers the queerness of this number. Often assigned to queer theory’s “antisocial” wing, he helps us disentangle the varieties of nothingness we encounter in Pet Shop Boys and, by extension, the thought of the antisocial that we have come to associate with Bersani’s oeuvre. The shared ground of Edelman’s queer theorizing with Ernesto Laclau’s account of “radical democracy” will, in turn, allow us to identify the temporal modes in which various escapes operate. As Laclau puts it, the time of our flight must remain “out of joint” if our imaginative projects are not to harden into totalitarianisms. Here Tennant’s abiding interest in Russian history, rife with tragic forms of the disappointment that infuses the band’s mood, becomes instructive.2 “We loved the future,” many post-Soviet Russians recall (Alexievich 185); “now they say we were never even saved,” they might continue, melancholically contemplating the nonarrival of their imagined lives (Pet Shop Boys, “My October symphony”). Pet Shop Boys turn to Russian themes—but also evoke Thatcherism, Fourierism, West Side Story, 9/11, the Black hopes that propelled the Great Migration, the gay utopianism of Village People, and the persistence of the fascist lure—to affirm the enthusiasm of dreamworlds and, at the same time, to acknowledge their catastrophic potential. How is an escape not to congeal into the totalitarian murderousness we witness in such songs as “Fugitive” or whose uncanny echoes some commentators have seen in the images of male collectivities in “Go West”? If not the totalitarian imagination’s “past-to-come” (Hage), what is the nothing that keeps us awake?

________

“Go West” (1993), the most prominent of the band’s escape anthems, is a cover of a 1970s disco classic by Village People, itself inspired by Jean-François Paillard’s 1968 reimagining of Johann Pachelbel’s seventeenth-century composition (Khawaja; Smith 331). In many ways, the mood coincides with that of “Wiedersehen”: the song, as Tennant says, is “about finding a promised land” (“Go West”).3 In the original, this was the Bay Area in California: San Francisco with its flower children and the emergent gay neighborhood of Castro. With the phrase that gives the song its title, Village People demonstrated the persistence of an old yearning for queerer futures: a collective existence organized around innovative sexual and affective norms.

The phrase “go west” is frequently attributed to the nineteenth-century US journalist and publisher Horace Greeley (1811-72). He was, if not the coiner, then at least the popularizer of the slogan “Go west, young man,” with which he, and those that followed, urged the fulfillment of the young nation’s “manifest destiny.” In imagining the utopian potential in the flight to the American West, Greeley borrowed from the ideas of Charles Fourier (1772-1837), the French thinker of communitarianism who advocated the establishment of “phalanxes” or “phalansteries” (phalanges), independently operated communities of sexual freedom. Having been introduced to Fourier’s ideas by Albert Brisbane, Fourierism’s primary Australian advocate, Greeley became a founding member of the North American Phalanx (1843-56), the Fourierist community that in turn functioned as a model for other such experimentations in sodality as Brook Farm, fictionalized by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Blithedale Romance (1852).

Although much of their sexual content was purged as they were introduced to American audiences in translation, Fourier’s books had a considerable influence on those who sought to reimagine their sexual and affective lives. Michael Moon suggests that Walt Whitman was among them: experimentations in homosocial sodality, his poems drew from Fourierist utopianism, gleaned from Greeley. In their different cultural contexts, Whitman and Fourier were “two of the most influential sexual-utopian writers and theorists of the nineteenth century” (Moon 314). “Fourier’s exorbitant and outrageous theories of sexuality,” Moon writes, “are the closest thing we have to anything like a fully elaborated system of erotic invention and discovery of the kind that Whitman sometimes gestures toward in his poetry but leaves generally more invoked and implicit than avowed and articulated” (313). If Fourier’s ideas were “ex-orbitant,” Whitman may have taken the opportunity to veer toward weirder constellations than that of his home planet. He was followed in this by a number of early-twentieth-century feminists who turned to Fourier for inspiration in their effort to think about the organizational possibilities in women’s-only communities (Goldstein; Poldervaart 59-61).

This effort to go off the orbit of one’s habitual life rings in “Go West.” The Village People version expresses the post-Stonewall era’s yearning for a flight into what Fourier called, in his posthumously published work, le nouveau monde amoureux: “the new amorous world.” Such is the telos of the escapees in “Two divided by zero,” too: the song depicts a flight from the trap of humdrum, potentially deadly, normativity. With the likes of Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy,” The Smiths’ “London,” George Michael’s “Flawless (Go to the City),” and Tracey Thorn’s “A-Z,” the song belongs to a long tradition: the search for “a gay arcadia,” a utopian space that enables “the union of lovers, the loving and sexual fraternity of men, and the washing away of societal guilt,” examples of which we find in the works of Virgil, Christopher Marlow, Walt Whitman, E. M. Forster, Thomas Mann, and Gore Vidal (Fone 13).

________

What becomes of such dreams of escape? They tend to dissipate, like “Go West,” into stranger afterlives. Against expectation, the Boys’ cover version does not finish with the “cold end” that presents itself at four minutes and twenty-three seconds, the triumphal dénouement of the final “Go West” sung by the male chorus. Instead, the climactic moment is followed by an outro in which the song is extended into instrumentation. This is not exactly unusual. In live jazz performances, we sometimes hear such outros as the singer punches in the song’s climactic line, but rather than ending here, the band continues with the theme of the song. What follows offers the singer an opportunity to thank the audience and the musicians before she exits the stage.

The outro in “Go West” is of a different character.4 Unlike the more familiar extended fadeouts in popular jazz pieces, the song’s remaining fifty seconds do not repeat the melody but introduce new instrumentation, accompanied by a wordless vocalization that sounds like pained moaning and then, as the song fades, the repeated, speeded-up, distorted line “Do you feel it?” by an apparently female voice.

This strange supplement—magnified into a five-minute club experimentation in the “Mings Gone West: 1st & 2nd Movement” remix—stretches the song beyond the conclusion toward which it has tended. What we thought will have been our arrival in the promised land appears, in retrospect, to have been a false ending: the moment is immediately transformed into an afterlife in which we hardly recognize our hopes’ major chords. Behind the hill from which we thought we would gaze at the promised land lies a more unfamiliar landscape. While Chris Lowe notes that “Go West” is “a song about an idealistic gay utopia,” he adds:

The outro makes musically explicit the fact that, as Ramzy Alwakeel observes, “Go West” is a “hymn to an unfulfilled dream.” If the song seeks to bring “waiting” to an end, as a manifesto of escape it is, like “Two divided by zero,” melancholic commentary on a failed project.

________

The historical context for the story’s dark turn concerns the AIDS epidemic, which emerged between the original song and its cover by Pet Shop Boys. The 1993 version speaks from the midst of the nadir: the epidemic had been rampant for a decade; the introduction of antiretrovirals and “combination therapies” will have to wait another two years, until the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the first protease inhibitors in 1995. Because of the AIDS crisis, the song, as Tennant says, “now had a kind of pathos. It was a memory of the dream of gay liberation” (qtd. in “Secrets”).

The song is an AIDS elegy in the sense in which Dagmawi Woubshet uses the term. Unlike the classic examples of the genre, early AIDS elegies, such as the poetry of Paul Monette and Melvin Dixon, are marked not only by despondency over the lost but also by a recognition of the poet’s precarity: “AIDS elegies are poems about being left behind, but they are also poems about leaving” (Woubshet 30). More often than not, AIDS elegists contemplate their own impending departures. If Pet Shop Boys give us elegies of gay life in the late twentieth century, their fugues include the elegist among the departees.

Typical to the band, the combination of futural hopes with their immediate—even strictly simultaneous—dissipation is frequently registered in the kinds of supplements exemplified in the Village People cover. An outro as discrepant as that of “Go West” is introduced into the Beatmasters’ 7-inch mix of “I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing” (a song included on Very and, after “Go West,” the band’s next single release). As the narrator of the irresistibly upbeat song lists all the unusual ambitions inspired in him by the thought of a new love, he concludes with the declaration, “I feel like taking all my clothes off / dancing to ‘The Rite of Spring.’” The wait is about to be over, yet we also understand that the speaker will not meet his beloved, any more than the Chosen One at the end of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet lives to witness the season for which she becomes the sacrifice. It is this moribund aspect of the final verse’s conclusion that get sonically repeated in the remix’s new ending.

The same theme—of time’s disordering of one’s hopeful plans—organizes the opening track of the band’s preceding studio album, Behaviour (1990). If the lyrics of “Go West” anticipate an escape to a homosexual promised land, those of “Being boring” recall one’s arrival in such a world: the narrator flees the suburban existence of his teenage years into the heady subcultural demimonde of 1970s London. He remembers how, “bolt[ing] through a closing door,” he had discovered the possibilities of what Fourier would call “association”: he embodies “the general desire of many persons to leave behind them the claustral work and family relations … in order to associate more freely with each other and to form bonds and alliances with likeminded and likehearted persons based on shared passions” (Moon 314).

The sound of the harp that is heard before the first and third verses—and that thus bookends the first two verses and the twice-repeated chorus—recalls the convention with which classic Hollywood cinema indicates the insertion of a flashback sequence into a film’s narrative. The gesture is appropriate: the first two verses consist of the narrator’s recollection of his childhood friendships and early adulthood flight to London. The second harp trill brings the recollection to an end, and we move to the present day of the 1990s. As much as “Go West” concludes with what sounds like an unexpected epilogue, the third verse, awakening the narrator from his reminiscence, recounts the disappearance of many of his friends and lovers from the stage in which the future unfolds: “All the people I was kissing / some are here and some are missing.” The absence is a surprise, for, as the narrator continues in an apostrophe, “I thought in spite of dreams / you’d be sitting somewhere here with me.” As in “Go West,” the epidemic disrupts the hope for a queerer future, recalling as it does Christopher Dowell’s early death (Tennant, One Hundred 11).

________

While “Go West” was released at the height of the AIDS epidemic, with no end in sight, it entered the charts amidst the turmoil precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union two years earlier. The connection echoes musically, too. Lowe has observed that the song “sound[s] surprisingly like the former Soviet anthem” (“Go West”). The two are eminently mashuppable; fans have set footage of Soviet military prancing to the song, images from which the band presently want to disassociate themselves.⁵ The Soviet imagery of the video—the flag-flying military parades, the Kremlin, the Yuri Gagarin Monument—only enforces the association. Early on in the video (directed by Howard Greenhalgh), the computer-animated Statue of Liberty seems to be transmitting messages to the world with her torch. Soon, the Boys invite us to ascend a flight of stairs at the end of which we again discover Lady Liberty, now in the form of Sylvia Mason-James (fig. 1). Still later, we see the song title’s imperative phrase illustrated with Tennant and Lowe as they, standing in front of Saint Basil’s Cathedral on the Red Square, point skyward (fig. 2). At the time of the song’s release, such gestures evoked bad blood among my friends. Are the Boys telling the ex-Soviets to join capitalism’s unstoppable march, the world that promises to end waiting with the immediate satisfactions of Western consumerism (figured in the video’s colorful beachballs)? Is the United States presented as a global beacon of “diversity” and “tolerance” (with the Statue of Liberty as a Black woman)? Is the song affirming the triumphalism that Francis Fukuyama and others represented in arguing that history had achieved its telos in neoliberal capitalism?

Fig 1. “Go West.” Directed by Howard Greenhalgh, YouTube, uploaded by Pet Shop Boys, 22 April 2009.

Fig 2. “Go West.” Directed by Howard Greenhalgh, YouTube, uploaded by Pet Shop Boys, 22 April 2009.

Here, too, the song’s melancholia complicates its messianism, whether homosexual or neoliberal. If we know that the homosexual communitarianism à la Fourier was sustained but for the briefest of moments, we might guess that the market forces’ promise to end the boredom satirized in Vladimir Sorokin’s late-Soviet novel The Queue (1985) is swiftly deflated. Such is the suggestion in “To step aside,” the penultimate track on Bilingual (1996). If Very had seemingly finished with the call for the Soviets, disappointed at the promise of the October Revolution, to join market capitalism, “To step aside” witnesses their lives some years henceforth: at another square—or why not, again, the Red Square—we meet

workers still queuing
patiently there
for market forces to provide
what history's so far denied:
for a different kind of fate
than to labour long and always wait.

The October Revolution pledged that a full life and a livable individuality was to be actualized in the proletarian society—hence the question of one of the shipmates in the beginning of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (“Why are we waiting?”) and its repetition in “No time for tears,” one of the songs on the band’s soundtrack for the film’s 2005 live performance at Trafalgar Square. The same promise—an end to waiting—was proffered with the move to market economy at the Soviet Union’s dissolution, a promise inscribed in the imagery of “Go West.” Yet “To step aside” is an addendum, if we need one, that thwarts what to some of my friends looked like the video’s capitalist triumphalism. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, waiting does not cease but changes form: the ex-Soviets join the Western citizenry not in their enjoyment of the consumer goods that tempt Sorokin’s Soviets but in their scrounging for work in conditions of shared precarity.⁶ All are subjects of, and to, optimism’s cruelty (Berlant).

________

The opening scene of Maria Schrader’s film Vor der Morgenröte (2016)—a depiction of Stefan and Lotte Zweig’s exilic years in South America—evokes Brazil’s appeal for the Austrian author. Preceded, under the opening credits, by the sound of birds’ singing, the first shot is of a sea of exotic flowers; a hand in a dainty white glove enters the screen, readjusting the arrangement. The birdsong is joined by chords of samba. The camera cuts to a full shot of a large dining hall; the colorful flowers are the centerpiece on a lengthy table around which numerous servers hover, suggesting the commencement of a state event. The doors are opened by uniformed attendants, and the man who we will learn is Zweig enters with Brazilian dignitaries, his hosts. Speaking in French, he flatters them with an anecdote with which they surely would have been familiar: “Do you know what Vespucci said as he arrived in the Bay of Rio in 1502?” he asks. “‘If paradise exists on Earth, it cannot be far from here.’” Polite laughter is prompted by the well-worn legend of Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who “discovered” the New World (as he called it), the world to whom he ultimately bequeathed his name.

Vor der Morgenröte is an analysis of a journey west. Zweig tells us that, as he began his South American sojourn, he was hoping “to build the sense of community [die Gemeinsamkeit] [he] had always dreamt of, but on a larger scale and to a bolder concept” (World 426 / Welt 452). Since nineteenth-century German sociology, such togetherness has often been considered an attribute of Gemeinschaften, the “organic” communities presumed to have existed before industrial modernity turned them into Gesellschaften. In a Gemeinschaft, one is at home, known, fully adapted to the soil; in a Gesellschaft, one becomes a stranger, an anonymous cog in a system, alienated from oneself and others. For a moment, Zweig was convinced that in Brazil he had discovered the communitarian intimacy of what Hegel, too, calls Gemeinsamkeit.⁷ He recalls re-finding the world of European yesterday there:

He similarly writes in Brazil: Land of the Future (1941) of his excitement over the fact that “no colour-bar, no segregation, no arrogant classification” seemed to organize the population, a color-blindness that had enabled “the creation of a uniform national consciousness” (8, 9). In Vor der Morgenröte, Lotte shares his enthusiasm as she gushes about her “incredible experience” in Brazil: “The various races live together so naturally that it seems like a miracle to us coming from Europe.” They seem to have found the Gemeinsamkeit that we hear expressed in repeated performative declaration of “Go West[‘s]” male chorus: “Together!”

The Zweigs refer to the country’s state-supported policies of racial mixing (mestiçagem), which have often been favorably contrasted with the hypodescent-based practices of racial segregation in the US or the perennial antisemitisms in Europe. Brazil’s cultural practices render the country a beacon of hope in the midst of fascism’s spread: “the experiment of Brazil, with its complete and conscious negation of all colour and racial distinctions, represents by its obvious success perhaps the most important contribution toward the liquidation of a mania that has brought more disruption and unhappiness into our world than any other” (Brazil 9). Such racial harmony is indicated in the film’s opening scene as one of the waitresses preparing for the arrival of the dinner guests places a flower behind the ear of another, the darkest of the women. Their colleague comments, in Portuguese: “Very elegant. Nobody would think you’re working here. You look like a madam.” We cannot imagine such a scene taking place in the contemporaneous United States, where the so-called one-drop rule demobilized darker bodies.

Startled by the unthinkable in fascism’s rise, Zweig sets his sights on “the land of the future,” where he identifies an alternative to the lousiness of Europe. Yet Schrader’s film also complicates the expatriates’ impressions. In a later scene, Stefan and Lotte are visiting a sugar plantation in Bahia in January 1941. One of their guides, an Afro-Brazilian man in work clothes, asks him, his question mediated by a lighter-skinned and more formally dressed translator, “Do you know how many pounds of sugar cane a good worker can harvest a day?” The query goes unobserved by the guest of honor: as others move on, Stefan remains behind, writing intensively in his notebook, oblivious to the question. Neither he nor we hear the answer; the details regarding the labor originally associated with the nation’s institution of slavery are dismissed as unimportant. For Zweig, the “European myth of fertility … suppress[es] the material realities of labor”; like many of his ilk previously, the newcomer to the colony “assume[s] that one need not labor for sustenance in tropical climates” (DeLoughrey 36). A moment later, Lotte discovers that the sweet commodity has teeth: she accidentally cuts their translator with the cane stalk she has been given to taste.

________

Having scored one of their most enduring hits with “Go West,” Pet Shop Boys covered another gay fugue in 1997: “Somewhere” from West Side Story (1957), a song, again, “about promised lands. Like ‘Go West,’ really. The same theme” (Lowe, “Somewhere”). Performed by Tony and Maria, the musical’s star-crossed lovers, the song speaks of the couple’s yearning to transcend the worldly obstacles that stand in the way of their affection (the ethnic conflicts expressed in and perpetuated by gang violence). The centerpiece in a musical originally brought to life by four Jewish, presumably homosexual men,⁸ “Somewhere” has resonated with gay audiences: while attributed to the heterosexual protagonists, it has become a gay anthem for its yearning for another, freer location, “a new amorous world.”⁹ As we learn, “There is a Sondheim cult and most of its members are gay” (Clum 213).

In the opening of their version, Tennant and Lowe sample from the musical’s 1961 screen adaptation the enraged, or anguished, question that Ice (Tucker Smith) asks of his comrades after the violent death of the Jets’ leader, Riff (Russ Tamblyn): “You wanna live in this lousy world?” The distorted line—first speeded up, then slowed down—reminds us of the question (“Do you feel it?”) with which the epilogue of “Go West” fades out. In the longer prologue to the song’s Extended Mix, the question is accompanied by another sample: “When the riots stopped, the drugs started.” This statement comes from Menace II Society, the Hughes Brothers’ 1993 depiction of gang violence in Los Angeles. It is spoken by the film’s protagonist and voiceover narrator—addressing us, as we will discover, posthumously—at the closing of the early sequence in which we see black-and-white news footage of the 1965 riots in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Taking place in the early 1990s, the film is set amidst the aftermath of what is often deemed a failed escape: Los Angeles was one of the urban locales outside the American South into which Black southerners had moved during the “Great Migration” of the first half of the twentieth century. The migrants had sought to flee the racism that federal nonresponsiveness had allowed to fester in the post-Reconstruction South. Yet they often found themselves facing the perhaps more intractable, because more diffuse, Jim-Crowism of the North: the diminished life chances that are the perennial crops of structural racism.

Posters for the original 1957 musical and the 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story centralize the theme of escape. We see Maria (Carol Lawrence, replaced in the movie posters by Natalie Wood) leading Tony (Larry Kert, subsequently Richard Beymer) by the hand in a joyous escape toward an unseen destination beyond the image’s frame (fig. 3). Despite the films’ stylistic dissonance, the poster would similarly work for Menace II Society. Like Maria, Caine’s (Tyrin Turner) love interest Ronnie (Jada Pinkett) plans for them to leave Los Angeles for a less blighted location. Her task is to save her man by taming his death-driven desires. The motif is borrowed from a long genealogy of sociological and psychological thought: the female is to exert a civilizing influence on the male’s primitive impulses (Wells 175-79). Like Maria grabbing Tony’s hand, or Ronnie asking Caine to move with her to Atlanta, the woman pulls the man out of the destructive cycle of his primordial passions, onto the track of a more sustainable futurity.

Fig 3. Poster for West Side Story, 1961. Directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. Starring Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood. © United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo.

________

Ice’s question—”You wanna live in this lousy world?”—similarly constitutes the subtext of “Fugitive” (2006), another one of Pet Shop Boys’ fugues. The prelude in the song’s “Richard X Extended Mix”—the version whose subtitle should be “The full horror,” repeating that of “Suburbia’s” 12-inch version (1986)—consists of languid notes, reminiscent of the opening orchestration of the “Somewhere” cover. The aural scene, evoking a sunny Tuesday morning, is suddenly interrupted by the sound of two airplanes, one after the other, passing immediately overhead. The setup suggests that the song’s narrator, hastening toward an imminent event that would mark his and his “brother’s” joint ascension to “Heaven,” is one of the 9/11 hijackers, on their way to Lower Manhattan.

“It’s always forever / in Heaven,” he declares. “We’ll all be together / in Heaven.” The song was originally released as the opening track to the additional disc of the special edition of the album Fundamental (2006), a supplement called Fundamentalism. Concomitantly, the “forever” at stake is the time of the fundamentalist imagination: the telos is a promised land in whose pursuit the narrator is ready to pull the world apart.

The definition of twentieth-century totalitarianism might go as follows: an orientation toward a lost—more precisely, stolen—essence the promise of whose recovery is embodied in a charismatic leader. That the narrator of “Fugitive” occupies the ranks of such seekers is suggested by the fact that, poised for their ascension, the band of brothers is “clean and prepared / to be led / indivisible.” Clean: the collective is purged of contaminating influences. Indivisible: purified sameness enables this familiar aspect of fascism’s iconography, announced in the adoption of the Roman icon of fasces, a collection of tightly bound rods, by the late-nineteenth-century Italian fascisti. Indeed, the title of the song is “Fugitive,” not “Fugitives”; the brothers’ indivisibility must be spoken in the singular. To be led: there is no fascism without a Führer, who exerts the kind of “fascinating” pull that Hitler has often been said to have wielded over Germans. The leader offers a clarity of vision regarding what has been lost; from him, the narrator also learns how the lost can return—can be redeemed—in the imminent future.

This is not an exceptional project. Such fundamentalism marks routine descriptions of “modernity.” As Ghassan Hage asks, “Does not modernity by its very nature stage a nostalgic subject who is forever waiting to overcome a sense of loss and alienation?” (207). Conceptualized in this way, modernity begins to resemble a totalitarian project. Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) that the appeal of twentieth-century totalitarianisms (fascism and Stalinism are her major examples) rests on their offer to rescue the alienated moderns from their “loneliness.” As etymology suggests, fascism would bind the atomized crowd into a body of purpose and unity.¹⁰

Mindful of this history of representations, some have shuddered at the images in “Go West.” In the video, we twice see Tennant and Lowe pointing skyward, first under the mural outside the Moscow Space Museum and then, an image given from two angles, in front of Saint Basil Cathedral (figs. 4 and 5). The gesture accrues dark undertones when it is repeated in the image of a collective hailing by anonymous men (fig. 6). Commentators have seen in the digitally replicated, neatly aligned men—their Gemeinsamkeit—unsettling echoes of homosexuality’s presumed desire for sameness (O’Donovan), which such influential thinkers as Theodor Adorno have connected to the totalitarian demand for uniformity. “Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together,” writes Adorno. Both are narcissistic conditions, intolerant of difference: like the fascist, the homosexual “negates everything which is not of its own kind” (Minima §24 [46]). The video still of the hailing men could be found among the archival illustrations of the proto-fascist Weimar Freikorps, whose “male fantasies” Klaus Theweleit famously analyzes.

Fig 4. “Go West.” Directed by Howard Greenhalgh, YouTube, uploaded by Pet Shop Boys, 22 April 2009.

Fig 5. “Go West.” Directed by Howard Greenhalgh, YouTube, uploaded by Pet Shop Boys, 22 April 2009.

Fig 6. “Go West.” Directed by Howard Greenhalgh, YouTube, uploaded by Pet Shop Boys, 22 April 2009.

Along the same lines, Uncyclopedia‘s now deleted entry for “fascism” gives us the following etymology lesson: “From the Latin word ‘fasces,’ meaning ‘a bundle of sticks,’ came the word ‘fascism,’ a collectivist ideology. From that same Latin word came the word ‘faggot,’ a word originally meaning ‘a bundle of sticks,’ but now used to refer to a male homosexual. What does that tell you about fascists?”¹¹ The question is rhetorical: we need no etymological lessons to tell us that fascists are fags; as Adorno, too, argues, their desire for sameness evinces the failure of the individualism that, as we are often told, modernity has augured since the Reformation, its collapse into murderous docility.

________

If totalitarianism offers the dream of indivisibility, Tennant and Lowe, as we have noted, begin their oeuvre with a gesture of division: “Two divided by zero.” The songwriters point out the ambiguity of the song’s title. While the fleeing couple, whether lovers or friends, are “divided by nothing”—a rather “romantic” notion, Tennant says—the phrase simultaneously, when taken as a mathematical formula, tells us something different: “Two divided by zero is infinity, isn’t it?” Lowe adds (“Two”). In this formula, the zero that has vexed Western thought since the ancients produces its seeming dialectical opposite, equally irksome for philosophy. “[T]he mathematical infinite was the fruit of the mathematical nothing,” Brian Rotman tells us: “it is only by virtue of zero that infinity comes to be signifiable in mathematics” (71). The nothing is indistinguishable from an infinity no less frightful for ordered thought. Plotinus’s and George Berkeley’s measured disagreements with the infinite may be but sublimations of a more profound terror that such limitlessness awakens.¹² Among its terrors is its ability to paralyze the subject into an endless waiting: as Maurice Blanchot writes, “one cannot act in the infinite, one cannot accomplish anything in the unlimited” (316).

It is this zero that Lee Edelman proposes fascinates us in various embodiments of what he calls queerness, its “antisocial” force. Mobilizing Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and Paul de Man’s account of literary language’s rhetoricity, he argues that being’s groundlessness precipitates, or necessitates the invention of, various figures that personify that which haunts all identities: the “constitutively excluded” impossibility of the zero-void-nothingness. “As the void within every situation that can never be counted or represented within it,” Edelman writes, “the zero maintains the place of queerness as ceaseless negativity” (Bad Education 90), much like, in Lacanian theory, the objet a indicates the void (das Ding) around which human subjects cohere as variously organized symptoms.

Among the names for such negativity we find not only “the queer,” about whom we read in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), but also, per afropessimist thought, “the Black” and, as Edelman further enumerates, “the woman” and “the trans”—”those ‘ones’ made to figure, in any given world, the zero … by literalizing nonbeing, which then, in the form of those ones, can be excluded from reality by excluding them” (Edelman, Bad Education 254). When Edelman speaks of “tropes” or “figures,” he uses the terms in de Man’s sense: always misnaming that which they are presumed to stand for, they infest language with “irony.” Consequently, meaning fails to stabilize itself and, instead, slips our grasp in a series of “misreadings,” an inherent characteristic, for de Man, of the mode of discourse we call literature. If we speak of “the radical threat posed by irony” (Edelman, No Future 24), it is because de Man deems this “threat” not a contingent aspect but constitutive—”at the root”—of language and, as Edelman extrapolates, being.

By turning the nothing into a divisor, Pet Shop Boys offer us what looks like the futural counterpart of the void. If we can speak of “the ironic temporalities at work in Pet Shop Boys” (Wodtke 37), the time of irony is different from that which operates in Edelman: we shift from the pure negativity of the zero to the infinite that the zero produces in dividing being.

Lowe’s point about the theme of infinity in “Two divided by zero” is supplemented—not negated—by Tennant’s observation, of the same song, that the protagonists’ determination to flee is not likely to be translated into a successful arrival in the imagined telos of New York City. The tension implies a corrective to Andrew Sullivan’s characterization of the mood that saturates the PSB oeuvre. To say that, with all the youthful “enthusiasm” he exhibits, the narrator at the same time evinces “a great sense of loss” may not be accurate. What accompanies expressions of futural “enthusiasm” in Pet Shop Boys’ gay fugues is not loss, that familiar alibi of totalitarian thought.¹³ Rather than the sense of alienation voiced in laments for the organic belonging of our happier pasts, we may want to speak of absence, troped in various “catachrestic positivizations” (Edelman, Bad Education 172). While for Edelman such figures are the abjected (the queer, the Black, the woman, the trans), in Pet Shop Boys they are most often actualized as visions of futural enthusiasm. After “Two divided by zero,” infinity’s promise is announced in “Being boring,” where, recalling his fugitive days amidst other queer escapees, the singer posits: “We were never … / worried that / time would come to an end.”¹⁴

________

As is the case with the hopes of escaping from Newcastle to London, the dream of an infinity—a “forever”—informs the fundamentalist flight plan, too. The fugitive is committed to realigning the time that some injustice has pulled out of joint: “We’ll be together / now and forever,” the narrator of “Fugitive” tells his “brother.” The “now” coinciding with a “forever,” we reach a communitarian togetherness, purged of irony. No strange supplements will complicate the triumph of our arrival to the promised land of our Gemeinsamkeit.

If the fugitive deems his existence to be marked by a chronic temporal disjunction, he is suffering from the out-of-jointness that Ernesto Laclau identifies as the ineradicable condition of democratic contestation. In an argument that seemingly agrees with Edelman’s,¹⁵ Laclau proposes that to think the communal entities who are the agents of contestation we must accept as our first principle the never-ending instability—the nonessentiality—of all such formations. The political principle coincides with an ontological operation, one that Laclau evokes with a familiar Shakespearean phrase. “Time being ‘out of joint,’ dislocation corrupting the identity with itself of any present,” he writes, “we have a constitutive anachronism that is at the root of any identity” (69).

In Edelman, this “constitutive anachronism” is symptomized in “irony.” Both thinkers’ accounts echo—the genealogies of their thought stretch to—the Hegelian theory of society’s dialectical tending toward Sittlichkeit, the covenanted “ethical community,” whose coherence is nevertheless destabilized by “the everlasting irony” that is “womankind [Weiblichkeit]” (Hegel, Phenomenology §475 [288]). Those for whom the images of the hailing multitude in “Go West” prompt the specter of fascism attest to the influence of this logic. What commentators see in such bodies of sameness is the exclusion of the destabilizing “irony” that would dissolve the self-same collective toward future-oriented metamorphoses. In such “male fantasies” (Theweleit), no Weiblichkeit infests totalitarian faggotry as its “internal enemy” (Phenomenology §475 [288]); instead, the lonely crowd is bound into the homofascist body.

The promise of fascism is to bring what Hage calls “forever waiting” to an end; the lost thing will have been returned to its rightful place. Edelman calls this the dream of “redemptive collectivism” (Bad Education 172), a togetherness not undermined by infinite irony. At the same time, the redemption, enabled by the coincidence of “now” and “forever,” marks the place of annihilation. While affirming political “messianism,” Laclau insists that “the messianism we are speaking about is one without eschatology, without a pre-given promised land, without determinate content” (74). In welcoming the end to waiting and the eschatological merging of the now and the forever, the fundamentalist fugitive, on the other hand, affirms a pledge to what Leo Bersani, echoed by Edelman, calls “the culture of redemption.” “Fugitive” confirms Bersani’s thesis: the culture of redemption is a culture of death. It is driven toward the death-desiring collapse of the “now” and “forever.”

The disjunction between the now and the forever renders us waiting beings, inhabited by the dreams exemplified by Zweig or Village People or revolutionary Russians. “When all the waiting is over, so will be our lives,” writes Raymond Tallis; “the wait itself [will have been our] portion” (James, “Beast” 540). Pet Shop Boys corroborate this in the funereal “Your funny uncle” when Tennant complements the Revelations’ eschatological litany (Rev. 21.4) by adding to it the phrase “no more waiting”: “No more waiting or crying / These former things have passed away,” he says, bidding his friend the final goodbye.

________

Are we there yet? If so, where have we arrived?

Zweig turns to the idea(l) of Brazil to plug in the “nothing” whose terror awakens him from his comfortable existence in Salzburg. Arriving in the promised land, he is unable to see that what appears to his colonial gaze as an “Edenic garden” is in fact “entangled with the violence of modernity and … the networks of plantation capitalism” (DeLoughrey 44). The revolutionary enthusiasm manifested in Russian history similarly hardens into various ideals whose implosion, as we learn from the interviewees in Svetlana Alexievich’s “oral history” of Russian life from the October Revolution to the 2000s, becomes indisputable by the early 1990s. The escapees in “Fugitive” are on the same track as they reach for a “past-to-come” in their effort to bring the now and the forever together. Each dreamworld will have reached a catastrophic end.

Yet there are other ways of staying awake with nothingness. Anticipatorily countering “Fugitive[‘s]” fundamentalist collapsing of the now and the forever, Pet Shop Boys’ debut album offers us yet another example of the way in which the two can nonfascistically coincide: “Tonight,” we learn, “is forever.”

This declaration, as well as many of lines in the song of that name, might be transposed to the mouth of the fundamentalist. As in “Fugitive,” the event toward which desire tends is both a singular and a futureless “forever”: “It will be like this forever / if we fall in love,” we hear, words that the fugitive might whisper to his copilot. Yet the experience of tonight’s infinitude is affirmed in its potential for repetition, in words we will never hear from the indivisible brothers: “We’re out again, another night / We never have enough.”

Desire’s unquenchability suggests that the speaker belongs amidst modernity’s thrill-seekers, those who escape their lives’ emptiness into the endless accumulation of the “sense experiences” offered by Erlebnisgesellschaft. In Adorno’s words, he is one of capitalism’s bewitched victims, “whirring around in fascination” with consumerist pleasures, an “ecstasy … without content” (“On the Fetish-Character” 292). This analysis is either confirmed or complicated by the song’s linkage to an earlier track on Please. While “Tonight is forever” is listed as the opening song on Side B of the original LP, subsequent compact disc printings of Please indicate that it is in fact preceded by “a hidden track”: the 33-second experimental piece “Opportunities (Reprise).” This title is not given in the original release, nor does the vinyl surface have the sparser grooves that mark a transition from one song to the next. The track reprises elements from the third song on Side A, where we, again, witness an invitation to escape from one wannabe fugitive to another. The singer is determined to get his share in 1980s Britain: “Let’s make lots of money!” he apostrophizes his would-be partner. He is after all the “opportunities” that the decade’s boom years made available to the sufficiently unscrupulous: “Ask yourself this question: / Do you want to be rich?”¹⁶

The Thatcherite dream’s return in the “Reprise” is yet another of the strange supplements that proliferate in the band’s songs. Here, however, the body and the parasite have switched places: rather than an ebullient song extended into a dissonant epilogue, an experimental snippet—a cacophony of traffic noise, cut-up dialogue, and fleeting beats—prefaces the dance track. The narrator of “Opportunities” insists that to ride the yuppie wave the partners have simply to “choose the perfect time”: “Oh, there’s a lot of opportunities / if you know when to take them.” The opening lyrics of “Tonight is forever” might be mistaken for the same narrator’s sentiments:

I may be wrong, I may be right
Money's short and time is tight
Don't even think about those bills
Don't pay the price, we never will

While the words echo the yuppie ruthlessness satirized in “Opportunities,” the song turns into an invitation for a different journey. In something of a negation of “Opportunities,” the narrator of “Tonight is forever” now seems to appeal to his partner with the promise of an escape from the decade’s economic ethos: “I haven’t got a job to pay / but I could stay in bed all day.” If “Opportunities” comments on the callous opportunism of the 1980s, the song’s augmentation with “Tonight is forever” suggests that the monologue of greed is in fact an erotic ploy: the seduction of wealth is but a way to get the apostrophized other to “stay in bed all day” with the speaker. In this, he invites the other to join him in being what he must appear to the Thatcherites: a lost cause.

Distilling the energies expressed in “Opportunities” into their nonessential, purely pleasurable form, “Tonight is forever” invites another look at the dream of endless accumulation. As Karl Marx recognized, capitalism is not anchored in any image of a lost homeland that might be regained. He admired its rapaciousness: it is a force of becoming, relentlessly melting and reconfiguring, unbinding and rebinding, everything, all the time. Yet such revolutionary forces, as he also noted, had been betrayed. The nothing that awoke the world from the “idiocy of rural life” (Marx and Engels 477)—arguably, Marx and Engels etymologically pun on the Heraclitean idios kosmos of solitary dreaming—could not be sustained, any more than the zero that Edelman designates as the constitutive exclusion of any social arrangement. In “Opportunities,” the bourgeoisie’s fetishistic logic is announced in the speaker’s determination to “make lots of money.” While, unlike the dreamer in “Fugitive,” the desire is not for a thing lost, the promised land is nevertheless a consuming object. “Tonight is forever” is an attempt to reimagine the Thatcherite dream by dissolving the ground or essence—the fetish of accumulation—that, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would say, has “territorialized” capitalism’s forces.

________

One unexpected aftereffect of the AIDS epidemic was the acceleration of the gay civil rights movement. The urgent, life-saving agitation by ACT UP and other organizations gave homosexuality a visibility that resulted in the remarkable gains of the subsequent decades. Pet Shop Boys acknowledge this development in the celebratory “Wedding in Berlin” (Hotspot, 2019). “We’re getting married,” the singer declares; “a lot of people do it / don’t matter if they’re straight or gay.” The wait is over: “We’re doing it without delay.” Yet, true to form, they follow this with yet another strange supplement: the song (and, with it, Hotspot) fades out with a distorted sound of church bells. The triumphal story of assimilation and acceptance, exemplified in the project of “marriage equality,” finds itself continued in a life where the sanctifying sound of wedding bells comes to us as if in a muddled nightmare.

Unlike the one in “Go West,” the outro of “Wedding in Berlin” is anticipated in the very beginning of the song, where we already, for a brief moment, hear the distorted chiming. As opposed to the dreams that deviate into the very danceable disappointment of “Go West[‘s]” end, we perhaps should have expected the discord that the project of marriage equality entails. Michael Warner, for one, told us. In The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999), he argued that the project necessarily depends on the assumption of gay people’s full assimilability into extant affective and societal arrangements, as well as the delegitimization of all kinship forms that fall outside their parameters. The trouble with normal is that it requires a punishingly strict criteria of inclusion; no “new amorous worlds” are found on this map. Such projects of normativization result in an impoverished “we” or the kind of “happiness” that is suggested by the same warped church bells heard at the end of “Happy people,” an earlier song on Hotspot, especially if we observe its resonance with Yazoo’s satirical song of the same name from 1983.

Similarly, gay Black artists of the 1980s and 1990s knew that life in the promised land might turn out more complicated. Marlon Riggs suggests as much in his experimental film Tongues Untied (1989). He visualizes his affective fascination with the emergent movement and his subsequent realization of the role in which he, as a Black man, would find himself among his homo-comrades. This is one of the ways in which, to quote Lowe, “in hindsight it wasn’t the utopia they all thought it would be” (“Go West”). As is suggested by the echoes of “manifest destiny” in the Village People song title, the utopian vision was, as all futural orientations are, compromised by unobserved internal dissonances.

Describing Brazil, Zweig, too, offers the standard representation of colonial settlements as “terra incognita” (Brazil 2), the empty slate that, as he writes in The World of Yesterday, “was still waiting for people to come and live in it, make use of it, fill it with their presence” (426). Perhaps such idealization was informed by the propaganda of Getúlio Vargas, the country’s dictatorial president. As Lotte Zweig discovers on the cane field, the utopian image of terra incognita bears a bloody history untold in official chronicles.

________

In March 1991, as the Soviet Union is entering its death throes, Tennant announces to his entourage: “I’m thinking of becoming a communist now. I love lost causes” (Heath 111). As we did to Sullivan’s, we offer a friendly amendment to his pronouncement. The evidence of the oeuvre suggests that at stake is an affirmation not so much of “lost” but “absent causes.” This conceptual shift neither ignores the bereavement evident in the band’s AIDS elegies—most notably, “Your funny uncle,” “It couldn’t happen here,” “Being boring,” and “Go West”—nor pathologizes, as the classic taxonomies of “melancholia” tend to do, one’s refusal to relinquish the love object. (According to the traditional diagnosis, the melancholic, adoring the dead thing, is caught in a fascinated paralysis, a mirror inversion of the consumerist ecstasy Adorno targets.) Rather, “absence” indicates the inability or refusal to suture the temporal gash, the noncoincidence of the now and the forever, in which Laclau identifies the moving force of political contestation. If Laclau’s schema rests on the ontological principle of being’s nonidentity with itself, this nonidentity prevents the redemptive imagination—whose directives, Bersani tells us, organize the most influential modern projects from Marcel Proust to Walter Benjamin—from occupying the pilot’s seat.

“We never have enough,” the narrator of “Tonight is forever” announces to his would-be partner. The line is spoken in the present rather than the future tense. Unlike the futural promise of fundamentalist eschatology (“We’ll be together / now and forever”), the infinity of “never enough” opens in an untimely now, refusing closure’s terror. This piece of pop wisdom is not unique to Tennant and Lowe. Both the Boys and Madonna (“I hope this feeling never ends tonight”) speak of an infinity in the now, “an eternal present in losing oneself in dancing and the music” (Wodtke 33). With this in mind, we can name the two infinities in Pet Shop Boys with some accuracy. In addition to the infinity in which “forever waiting” would come to an end—the “infinity of the lost cause,” observed in “Fugitive”—we have an “infinity of an absent cause.” While in the former mode one absents himself from the unbearable world by closing the temporal gap, in the latter the departure enables the subject’s hovering, in the world but not of the world. These are techniques for one’s nonsuicidal disappearance from this world: into thin air.

Mikko Tuhkanen is Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where he teaches African American and African-diasporic literatures, LGBTQ+ literatures, and literary theory. He is the author of, among other books, The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright (2008) and The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani (2018). He is the editor of Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond (2014) and Fascination and Cinema, a special issue of Postmodern Culture (2020); as well as the coeditor, with E. L. McCallum, of The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014) and Queer Times, Queer Becomings (2011). His other publications include essays in PMLA, diacritics, differences, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, James Baldwin Review, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing two book-length studies: “Time’s Witness: On James Baldwin” and “Some Speculation: Thinking with Pet Shop Boys.”

Footnotes

1. Apart from the ones discussed in this essay, the following songs in the PSB catalogue explore, in various ways, “escape”: “Bright young things,” “Burning the heather,” “A cloud in a box,” “Dancing in the dusk,” “Dreamland,” “Forever in love,” “Girls don’t cry,” “Hit music,” “In his imagination,” “Into thin air,” “I want a lover,” “London,” “More than a dream,” “A new life,” “New York City boy,” “Nightlife,” “An open mind,” “Saturday night (forever),” “This must be the place I waited years to leave,” “We all feel better in the dark,” and “Wings and faith.”

2. While the most prominent examples of Tennant’s fascination with Russian history are “My October symphony,” which narrates the disorientation caused by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in former ideologists, and the 2005 soundtrack that the band provided to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), examples stretch from the reference, in the final verse of “West End girls,” to Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 return from his exile in Switzerland to Russia to such recent songs as “Living in the past” and “Kaputnik,” written as responses to the Crimean invasion. For more, see Studer; and Smith 321-25.

3. The phrase “promised land” appears in the song’s middle eight (“There where the air is free / we’ll be what we want to be / Now if we make a stand / we’ll find our promised land”), which PSB added to the original: see “Secrets.”

4. We can understand the band’s refusal of a simple cold end by observing what the device has signaled in musical history. A cold end tells us that “someone decided that the song should end right there. That the song should end in that way. No ambiguity. No doubt” (“About Cold Fade”). The corruption of the cold end in “Go West” not only works to sustain such Pet Shop Boys virtues as “ambiguity,” but also problematizes the familiar bête noire of the band: the Rock Authenticity of the 1980s and 1990s, where the gesture signaled bands’ efforts to distinguish themselves from their predecessors in the genres of funk and disco:

As if commenting on this tradition, a cold end in a Pet Shop Boys song is likely to be pushed into something very different from—satirizing the pretensions of—those signaling rock credibility. The best example is the live version of “Jealousy,” sung by Robbie Williams on Concrete (2006), whose arrangement changes the original album version’s fadeout into a bombastic finish worthy of Wagner or Sibelius. “It’s just slightly over-the-top, the end of that song,” Tennant jokes with the audience.

5. See the YouTube videos “Go West vs. Russian National Anthem”; and “Russians Go West.” It is perhaps such associations that have enhanced Tennant and Lowe’s outspoken revulsion at the Ukrainian war: immediately after the Russian invasion began on February 24, 2022, visitors to the band’s website would see the Ukrainian flag on its front page, with a post dated May 18 “look[ing] forward to the day when fascism fails in Russia.”

6. As Smith asks in her close reading of the video for “Go West”:

7. As Hegel declares in Phenomenology of Spirit, “human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds [der zustande gebrachten Gemeinsamkeit des Bewußtsein[e]]” (§69 [43] / 65, brackets in German orig.). For him, Gemeinsamkeit is an Enlightenment achievement, the mode of ethical togetherness he calls Sittlichkeit.

8. The men in question were Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim. On the musical’s composition and importance to gay audiences, see Kaiser 89-94.

9. Charles Kaiser writes: “The lyrics of ‘Somewhere’ in particular seemed to speak directly to the gay experience before the age of liberation. In 1966, it was one of the songs chosen for the first mass gay wedding of two hundred couples in San Francisco, presided over by the city’s mayor, Willie Brown” (93).

10. In such collectivities, “difference” is—as Bersani often puts it, precisely our context in mind—”exterminat[ed]” (Is the Rectum 43, 183). Thus, when we hear in “Wiedersehen” of “modernity attacked” with the rise of the Third Reich, the statement’s grammatical status is ambiguous. Most immediately, we perhaps hear in it the passive voice, whose hidden agency belongs to those inspired by, say, Julius Evola’s diagnoses of modernity’s perversity. At the same time, the sentence follows the regular grammatical construction: “modernity” is the subject, “to attack” the verb. This grammar informs the arguments by Adorno (and, later, Giorgio Agamben), for whom the Third Reich is not an aberration but the fulfillment of the Enlightenment spirit.

11. See uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Fascist (last accessed May 7, 2014; spelling and punctuation silently corrected).

12. Arthur Lovejoy writes: “Like most Greek philosophers, [Plotinus] feels an aesthetic aversion to the notion of infinity, which he is unable to distinguish from the indefinite. To say of the sum of things that it is infinite is equivalent to saying that it has no clear-cut arithmetical character at all. Nothing that is perfect, or fully in possession of its own potential being, can lack determinate limits” (66). As Bishop George Berkeley subsequently observes in 1734, the claim that “a finite quantity divided by nothing is infinite” is “shocking to good sense” (79). A. W. Moore tracks the ways in which for numerous thinkers the zero-division—and infinity in general—has meant risking falling into an “abyss of absurdity” (2).

13. The experience of “loss” is characteristic of what Patricia Juliana Smith calls “postimperial” imagination: “The condition of postimperiality is, perforce, one marked by a pervasive sense of loss, particularly a loss of dominance, power, status, and therefore, by extension, masculine prerogative; thus, in effect, it raises anxieties of castration, impotence, and feminization” (323). The convulsions precipitated by such (imagined) losses produce not only what Paul Gilroy calls “postcolonial melancholia” but also, as Weimar Germans knew and twenty-first-century Americans know, a desire for the resuscitation of past greatness.

14. Others, too, have observed the theme of “infinity” in Pet Shop Boys. For two variously slanted discussions, see Balfour; and Wodtke.

15. We detect echoes of Laclau when Edelman writes of “the constant pressure of the zero that procures and undoes every ‘one,’ thus making the zero, in its queerness, in its inaccessibility to sense, the (non)ground of political conflict” (Edelman, Bad Education 95). Yet the difference between the two thinkers concerns their divergent conceptualizations of the radical negativity that operates (in) the system. While Edelman insists on the irredeemability of pure negativity, the theory of radical democracy allows the resolution of contradictions in the dialectical movement. In his previous work, Edelman indicates his disagreement with the dialectical model that informs Laclau’s theory by criticizing Judith Butler’s account of performativity—where abjected modes of being can be rendered symbolically legible through the work of “resignifying”—as “all too familiarly liberal … in its promise to provide the excluded with access to a livable social form” (No Future 103-04). Despite the disagreement, Edelman’s system, precisely in its approximation of the theory of radical democracy, becomes confluent with the account of dialectics that ground Butler’s and Laclau’s work: see Tuhkanen 126-27n.

16. The singer expresses his determination to get onboard the financial programs premised on what we have since called “neoliberalism,” which included Margaret Thatcher’s policy of privatizing most public services. (“They’re buying and selling your history,” as Tennant observes of this scheme in “Shopping” [Actually, 1987]; “… I heard it in the House of Commons / everything’s for sale.”) In the 1980s, this ethos coincided (in ways that became superfluous in subsequent decades) with vicious homophobia, exemplified in the passing of Clause 28 in Britain (in which the band recognized, as they declared in an ad posted in the Independent, the Thatcher government’s “fascism” [qtd. in Hodges 195]) and, in the United States, Ronald Reagan’s studied inaction amidst the AIDS crisis. On PSB and Thatcherism, see also Smith 315-20.

Works Cited

• “About Cold Fade.” Cold Fade: The End of the Song Is Just the Beginning, tumblr, https://coldfade.tumblr.com/aboutcoldfade.
• Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. 1951. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso, 2005.
• –––. “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” 1938. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, Continuum, 1982, pp. 270-99.
• Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. 2013. Translated by Bela Shayevich, Random House, 2017.
• Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” 1969. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review P, 1971, pp. 127-86.
• Alwakeel, Ramzy. Smile If You Dare: Politics and Pointy Hats with the Pet Shop Boys. Repeater, 2016.
• Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1951. 2nd ed. 1958, Meridian, 1969.
• Balfour, Ian. “Revolutions per Minute, or the Pet Shop Boys Forever.” Surfaces 1, 1991, pp. 5-21.
• Berkeley, George. The Analyst; or, A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician, wherein It Is Examined Whether the Object, Principles, and Inferences of the Modern Analysis Are More Distinctly Conceived, or More Evidently Deduced, Than Religious Mysteries and Points of Faith. London: J. Tonson, 1734, https://archive.org/details/analystordiscour00berkrich/mode/2up.
• Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011.
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John Paul Ricco (bio)

Abstract

This essay highlights the centrality of the concept of “incongruity” in Leo Bersani’s thinking of ethical relation. It is structured by the incongruous coupling of Eimear McBride’s novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings, especially Blue Black (2000), as it considers the ethical value of going along with the unwatchable and unreadable (e.g., gender and sexual violence), and with monochromatic abstraction in the context of race. According to Bersani, incongruity is the syntax of undivided being. By looking at ungrammatical literary syntax (McBride) and chromatic oneness (Kelly), the essay argues for ethical alignments absent of predication or congruity as it affirms an antisocial aesthetics of incongruous oneness as opposed to the often-murderous fixation on identity and difference.

I. Incongruous Couples

“The vagina is a logical defect in nature.” Readers of this article will likely recognize this quotation as the opening sentence of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s essay, “Merde alors,” originally published in the journal October 13 (1980), and then republished as the first chapter of what was to be Bersani’s last single-authored book, Receptive Bodies (2018).¹ The sentence can be read as a statement about something taken to be unlovable, and it can perhaps be read as a statement that is hard to love. As the essay’s opening sentence, it also might be taken as a deliberate provocation that raises the question of why its reader would continue to read on. This is not accidental, since the essay is about why we look, watch, and at times stare; and more specifically, why we look, watch, and at times stare at what is unwatchable—what is not to be looked at, let alone stared at. In addition to being about what we might call the visual drive, and the at times questionable lures that attract it, these are also questions about duration (keeping on looking), and repetition (looking at something again and again). That is, these are questions about the duration and repetition of visual attention and fascination, especially fraught when the object of fascination is a representation of intolerable sex, art, violence—or, as we will see, the combination of all three in literature. The kind of visual attention and fascination that concerns the authors entails a paradoxical active passivity and passive activity that is captured by the word “willing,” as in “willing to go along with,” to be receptive, to submit to, to be complicit in, and to give oneself over or up to. Specifically, to that which is morally questionable, and what in the context of this essay, I am calling the unlovable.²

For Bersani, the seductive and the intolerable (like receptiveness and repulsion—again, as in sex or aesthetics), are more than intimately connected. Further, in their non-dialectical rapport, the seductive and the intolerable are operative at the same time, and thus wholly irredeemable. “The seductive and intolerable image” that appears in Bersani’s famed essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) “of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” is, as Joseph Litvak has recently argued, “intolerable because it is seductive,” and, we add, seductive because it is intolerable (Bersani, Is the Rectum 18; Litvak 232). So too, with the scenes of rimming in Genet’s last novel, Funeral Rites, that Bersani discusses in Homos, and with the sadism of Pasolini’s last film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is the subject of his and Dutoit’s essay, “Merde alors.”

We can take Bersani and Dutoit to be arguing that as willing spectators of such scenes of violence as those represented in Salò, we approximate the never-saying-no that is the unconscious. And that in our willingness not to say no to the unwatchable (in our willingness to go along with it, and thereby to repeat it, inaccurately), we say yes to what is impossible to know or to render in art or language. As Bersani will later define it,

the unconscious never is; it is perhaps an essentially unthinkable, intrinsically unrealizable reserve of human being—a dimension of virtuality rather than of psychic depth—from which we connect to the world, not as subject to object, but as a continuation of a specific syntax of being.

(Is the Rectum 147–48)

It is by going along with the unwatchable, as the drawing from this reserve that is the non-repressed unconscious, that we move—non-volitionally—into a limitless realm of reformulations and recategorizations that Bersani and Dutoit in 1980 name “aestheticism” and that Bersani later describes as “a specific syntax of being,” “choreographed being,” and at other times, simply as “thinking.”³ As the authors write, we “never tire of being spectators; but it is the very limitlessness of our aestheticism which constitutes the moral perspective on sadism in Salò” (Bersani, Receptive 14).

In this essay I am proceeding in a manner similar to the way Bersani composed his arguments, namely by the incongruous juxtaposition of authors, artists, texts, and works.⁴ This method is especially evident in the book he co-authored with Dutoit, The Forms of Violence—itself an elaboration of the argument they present five years earlier in “Merde alors”—that brings together Assyrian sculptural reliefs, Marcel Proust, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory; and in their article, “The Pregnant Critic,” which brings together Beckett, Rembrandt, Diotima of Plato’s Symposium, and that in its attention to Ellsworth Kelly, will be of central interest in part three of my discussion.⁵

Here, my main incongruous coupling is Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014), and Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Black (2000), a painted aluminum work commissioned as a permanent installation for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. A novel about sexual abuse, violence, and rape, and a work of monochromatic abstract art—regardless of their contemporaneity—would seem to have very little, if anything, in common with each other. Yet it is the very incongruity of their pairing, as well as the incongruous logic by which each of the works operates, that I am interested in exploring within the context of this journal issue. For the incongruous is another name for the antisocial and its afterlives.

In the case of McBride, we are confronted with the afterlife of the modernist literary form, narrative, the novel, and most importantly, syntax. With Kelly, it is the afterlife of modernist abstract art and specifically the monochrome. The “unlovable” is there in McBride’s subject matter and a literary style that is the impoverishment of syntactical logic (congruence), and in Kelly’s chromatic refusal of what Benjamin Buchloh has recently described (in relation to artist Gerhard Richter) as the compensatory gratification of chromatic satisfaction, resolution, or reconciliation, that is, congruence (Molesworth). Like the Samuel Beckett, Mark Rothko, and Alain Resnais of Bersani and Dutoit’s Arts of Impoverishment, Eimear McBride and Ellsworth Kelly are artists who create works that would seem as though they do not want to be read or seen, works that in that precise sense might be understood as unlovable. However, in this essay, I will argue for the ethical virtue of going along with what is unlovable and explore how art provides us with a training in how to do so.

Indeed, in reading McBride’s novel and looking at Kelly’s wall panels, there is a certain experience of susceptibility, receptivity, passivity, and absorption, yet in a way that is non-mimetic. These works are not reliant upon predication or social determination—and their logics of equivalence and unification—and therefore operate separate from the reproductive/reflective realist point of view, including via narrative, and the terms of identity (performatively iterative or otherwise). Just as with my incongruous juxtaposition of the two works, they themselves point to incommensurable relations mobilized through impersonal and anonymous forms. That is, in the unnamed narrator and all the other characters of McBride’s story, and in the impersonal names of Kelly’s colors, these works operate outside the symbolic order of meaning (congruence), including the figural, and social recognition.⁶ In McBride we discover a syntactical oneness, and in Kelly a chromatic oneness, both of which are unlovable and therefore worthy of going along with.

Finally, by considering works focused on gendered female subjectivity and, as we will see, reading them in terms of racial subjectivity, we have the opportunity to engage with forms of subjectivity that Bersani’s work rarely discusses, and yet to which his work holds great potential. Thus, through my reading of the novel, we move from Bersani and Dutoit on Pasolini and sadism to McBride and masochism. While in relation to the wall panels, we move from Bersani and Dutoit’s reappraisal of their own initial reading of Kelly’s monochromes to artist Glenn Ligon’s aesthetic recategorization of black and blue via Kelly’s work in St. Louis.

II. On the Ethical Virtue of Going Along With What Is Unlovable

In their essay on Pasolini’s Salò, Bersani and Dutoit give two reasons to watch the unwatchable when they write:

It is important to note that both reasons entail finding oneself as a viewer inaccurately replicated, either in the work of art and its representations of violence, or in the world, as part of an infinite series of other places and forms in which we discover our sameness as pre-existing through our reception by and refracting of ourselves by those forms. Yet importantly, as the authors stress, we cannot detach ourselves from our implication in the world’s violence; and artistic representations of violence are the non-violent formal means of registering this implication. In turn, as they also argue, any delusional self-exoneration from the economy of sex, pleasure, pain, and ontological shattering is the ground for the ongoing sanctioning of violence against others.

In the current censorious climate in which we are constantly encountering assertions that certain things are off limits and should not be spoken of or represented due to their sexual, violent, or sexually violent content, Bersani and Dutoit’s argument is more necessary and important than ever, since it provides the best reasons to stay with the unlovable as presented in art, film, and literature.⁷ One of the principal reasons is that doing so is to refuse and defy what has been deemed “the order of nature” and the ways in which this purported natural order of things renders certain things abnormal, monstrous, or defects of nature. This tradition goes at least as far back as Ovid and the myth of Pygmalion, the latter of whom creates a statue of a female figure not simply to satisfy an erotic desire of idealized femininity but as an aesthetic means of substituting and compensating for his conception of the feminine as disgusting, as unlovable. And so, we read in Charles Martin’s translation: “Pygmalion observed how these women lived lives of sordid indecency, and, dismayed by the numerous defects of character Nature had given the feminine spirit, stayed as a bachelor, having no female companion” (qtd. in Schwartz).

In Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, the libertine Duke echoes the words of Ovid/Pygmalion on the order of nature when he commands the female sex slaves to “offer your fronts very little to our sight; remember that this loathsome part, which only the alienation of her wits could have permitted Nature to create, is always the one we find most repugnant” (qtd. in Bersani, Receptive 1). This repugnance is the case because, as Bersani and Dutoit explain, “[t]he most intense Sadean—and sadistic—sexuality depends on symmetry, and with women, Sade’s men enjoy the diminished pleasures of asymmetrical sex” (Receptive 2). This is because, as the authors further explain, non-diminished sadistic pleasure (and, evil) is pleasure doubled when its pain is inflicted on someone identical to the sadist.

Sadism is the finding of pleasure and enjoyment in the reproduction in the other of the pain and suffering of one’s own originary (masochistic) shattering. This definition is based upon a familiar and widely accepted psychoanalytic postulate understood to be axiomatic about the role of sexuality in hominization. Namely, that out of a shattering precipitated by sexual stimulation the human being is (traumatically) born, such that every human being is a masochistic subject that seeks and desires this shattering, since it is the force that provides that subject with a sense of itself as being in the world. This “perversion” is essential, ontologically ineradicable, and thus one of the ineradicable principles of human being. As I imagine Oliver Davis and Tim Dean would be inclined to put it, human being is deplorable.⁸

Bersani said that his famous first sentences often occurred as “a kind of mental lightning effect” of being struck by a formulation of thinking in language that, as evident in the next two examples, was often about the unlovable: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it,” or “Nobody wants to be called a homosexual.”⁹ Yet it is precisely such seemingly unlovable sentences about the unlovable that cause him to be attached to them and “to develop a terrible feeling of fidelity” to them, “as if the book or essay has to be written because I’ve been hit, or infected, by that sentence (to adopt a term used by E. M. Forster, who described the writing of A Passage to India as a ‘voluntary surrender to infection’” (Bersani, “Broken” 415). In other words, Bersani, he who is struck by these opening sentences as they come to mind as though from outside himself, submits to them, and by going along with them, including in their famously counter-intuitive logic, is authored by them and needs to craft an argument faithful to their conceptual power.

My sense is that something similar describes the experience of novelist Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. Written over the course of six months in the spring and summer of 2004 when she was twenty-seven years old, the novel (her first) would not be published until 2014, after years of rejections by editors and presses. Since then, it has garnered many awards, the highest praise from critics and readers, and is widely considered a masterpiece of modern literature, notable for its depictions of sexual violence and its inimitable style. My interest is in the relation between this violence and this style.

A Girl is the story of the “masochistic self-debasement” that a young girl in 1980s Ireland undergoes primarily as a kind of retribution for the numerous setbacks and assaults that her slightly older brother endures as a brain cancer survivor, living with learning and other disabilities, and with a slim chance of living beyond his young adulthood, given that the brain tumor was never fully excised or remedied. Critic David Collard has described the girl’s decisions and actions this way: “The girl rages against the dying of her brother’s light, her sense of imminent loss feeding her sexual abjection. She adopts a complex set of behaviors to negotiate her rage, confusion, and exploitation, seeking out forms of yearning abjection that amount to self-harm” (222).

As close friend and fellow author Elizabeth McCracken relates in an anecdote about her first encounter with McBride’s book manuscript:

I knew she’d been working on a book—she called it her beast—and when she was finished she’d asked me to read it. I took it nervously, because I wanted to love it and yet I knew there is no guarantee you will feel the same way about someone’s fiction that you do about the person. I knew nothing at all about it. And for the first page and a half I thought, Oh dear, no, too self-conscious, what a shame. Then about halfway down the second page my brain figured it out and the book had me, and I realized that the prose was the opposite of self-conscious: it just took my self-conscious brain that long to give itself over to the language.

(Collard 22)

Giving oneself “over to the language” is as much, if not more, about the writing being the force that renders one submissive, as it is the result of some subjective agency in the reader. As Collard puts it, as we go along and continue to read the novel, “the book begins to read us.”

My question is: why do we go along with this and allow it to happen? Why do we stay with a story of relentless sexual, physical, and emotional violence? To think further about this, let us turn to the following passage from the novel:

One-word sentences; the elimination of all commas; the truncated and non-syntactical syntax (“Wonders what this is but I’m”); epizeuxis or the simple repetition of the same word or phrase, as in “Beautiful beautiful” (again, without a separating comma or other form of punctuation); the constant repetition of first- and third-person pronouns: “His. He rip me open and hurt because I say though I don’t want, he beg;” the ungrammatical use of tenses (“he rip me;” “he beg”); and the repeating of phrases such as “I say,” appearing three times in this short excerpt. Each of these rhetorical devices constitute a non-descriptive, non-immobilizing, and non-isolating presentation of the rape of the young girl by her uncle. Reading this passage, one feels immersed in the emergent encounter between language, experience, and thought, and, at times, the relation between language and thought prior to articulate speech—what I have elsewhere theorized as “fore-speech” (Ricco, “Drool”).¹⁰ In this way, McBride turns the writing of literature into the impossible project of narrativizing an un-narrativizable (i.e., unlovable) psyche.¹¹

Less than statements about what is unlovable, or even fully formed unlovable statements, in McBride’s writing it is language itself that proves to be unlovable. The one-word sentences suggest that this is the potential or condition of any word, even the most seemingly simple or innocuous: “whatever,” “want,” “his,” or “I.”¹² Yet at the same time, this is also an acknowledgement and opening to sense prior to language (the unconscious, psyche, but also soma—the body): a zone of non-knowledge for which language proves to be curiously inadequate—what Bersani described as “the nonlinguistic biology of human life” (Freudian 40). It is the acknowledgement, indeed the willing reception, of a force that runs through, under, and to the side of history, consciousness, knowledge, language, narrative, and art—at once before and beyond us, but never of us.¹³ It is a force that drives and that stills. It is unspeakable, unwatchable, unreadable. And when we give ourselves over to it, as readers of literature, we avail ourselves to the force of de-realized, mobile being.¹⁴

As Bersani goes on to argue in his book The Freudian Body,

The stuttering, truncated, and at times gasping rhythms (or more properly: arrhythmias) of McBride’s novel are the persistent allowance of, to quote Bersani again, “the unreadable pressures [and pleasures] to infiltrate the readable, thus creating a type of readability at odds with how we have been taught to read [and write] while also accounting for that which, in the human psychic structure, is anterior to all readable accounting for” (Receptive 71). The literary outcome—of which McBride’s novel is exemplary—is what Bersani describes as “a striking concordance between a ‘system’ of untheorizable psychic respiration and the system of language” (“Broken” 417). McBride herself has spoken of an “antisocial literary adventure” that is played out through “basic active vocabulary” (Collard 140; 135).

There is violence when narrative and the having and telling of a story is made compulsory. This is especially the case when the story that is forcibly elicited is about sexual violence or rape, or, as Laura Mulvey and Clair Wills have each pointed out, is a story about sadism or abortion.¹⁵ As Bersani and Dutoit argue: “Narrativity sustains the glamour of historical violence. Narratives create violence as an isolated, identifiable topic or subject [a fully formed thing] … Violence is thus reduced to the level of a plot; it can be isolated, understood, perhaps mastered and eliminated” (Receptive 9). Such pacifying power is its own immobilizing form of violence, and “a major trouble with this is that the immobilizing of a violent event invites a pleasurable identification with its enactment.” The authors end this part of their discussion by stating, “All critiques of violence, to the extent that they conceive of it in terms of scenes which can be privileged, may therefore promote the very explosions they are designed to expose or forestall” (Receptive 10).

By sticking with and continuing to read (and endure) what is unlovable, rather than critique it, we at the same time give ourselves over to what in language inevitably succumbs to unreadability. In this passivity and receptivity, we actively withdraw from the negativizing impulses of narrativity and mastery and the self-assertive campaigns of seriousness, and instead discover an aesthetic connectedness to others: a resonance and rapport that occurs even at the minimal syntactical level of the otherwise annihilating one-word sentence—indeed, in the very syntactical impoverishment of the monosyllabic as sentence. McBride’s is that form of writing which demolishes its own syntax, and in so doing does not betray but remains loyal to the masochistic violence that is presented in the story. It syntactically goes along with this violence, yet in ways that are not mimetically descriptive, and hence do not provide the comforting, mediating distance that comes with such descriptive mimesis.¹⁶

In the case of A Girl, the non-spectacular non-mimetic representation of sexual commotion makes the literary language something entirely other than the replication of sadomasochistic sexuality’s destruction. Neither McBride nor, through her writing, her readers adopt what Bersani and Dutoit describe as the sympathetic appropriation of the other’s violent commotion—a kind of self-imposed masochism—the requirement of which, is fascism. In other words, if one calls for such sympathetic appropriation of the other’s violent commotion, one is at the same time calling for the fascist society of masters and slaves (Receptive 5–6). This is the position of the uncle in the story, who, to paraphrase Bersani and Dutoit, uses violence to make the victim (the girl) give birth to sexuality in the torturer (the uncle himself).

Like the unlovable yet deeply loving narrator, McBride’s work demonstrates the degree to which language is a half-formed thing. This is what we find lovable about language or at least why we might be willing to go along with it. For us to be in language is, then, also to find ourselves unlovable, and as such, we become attuned to that which is “unfixable in the human,” a shared existential condition that renders each of us a half-formed thing. In that half-formedness we stand the chance of connecting with others, not through the “representation of alienated commotion” that is sadism (Receptive 3) but through an aesthetic stillness in which, by being limitlessly fascinated and going along with the work of art, we are stopped in our tracks—not fixed but transfixed by something other than sexual, narrative, or moral climax, namely, the promiscuous mobilization and inaccurate replication of linguistic forms. Like Pasolini, Bersani, and McBride, we should not be afraid to be unlovable.

III. Chromatic Oneness

Incongruity represents a crucial problem for a theory of perception because, by its very nature, its perception represents a violation of expectation.

—Bruner and Postman

The notion of a divided self needs to be eclipsed for there to be any chance of an ethical rapport with others—human and nonhuman—and with the world. This is one of the fundamental propositions at the heart of Leo Bersani’s work, a starting point for his radical dismantling of Western philosophy’s thinking on the individual subject from Plato to Descartes, Freud to Levinas and Lacan (and many others between and beyond). However, Bersani contests this tradition’s presupposition of the divided self, not by resorting to a notion of wholeness or uniformity but in terms of incongruous oneness, which is, at the same time, not actualized completion but unfinished virtuality.¹⁷ Pursuing Bersani’s notion of incongruity as the logic, syntax, and rhythm of the undivided self and the potentiality of a oneness of being, we find an articulation of incongruity, virtuality, freedom, and non-predicated being in the following sentence: “Incongruity institutes virtualities that have no intrinsic reason to be actualized. This retreat from the actual creates a freedom that might be defined as a kind of being to which no predicate can be attached” (Bersani, Thoughts 66).

Neither split and incoherent nor autonomous and complete, the Bersanian subject is that form or mode of being for which even “incongruous” is not a predicate, given that the term is meant to name a relational movement that is open to virtualities and to similitudes outside of and beyond the self. Likeness or sameness is here not based on a single predicate shared amongst different entities, as in certain notions of the common, but instead likeness obtains in similar forms of movement and stillness that inaugurate impersonal correspondences with others and the world.¹⁸ It is due to the lack of congruence to itself and others—what Bersani, via Samuel Beckett, refers to as “lessness”—that the self has a greater potential to be like and relate to other things (Bersani, Is the Rectum 166). This is at once the self’s source of freedom and its sense of oneness with the world. It is precisely because being is without proper fit with the world, all the while not being divided from it, that a subject comes to enjoy the pleasure of finding itself not only in the world but mobilized and inaccurately replicated through it.¹⁹

For Bersani, such oneness is inevitably not without its exclusions, and yet he also affirms that such exclusions—precisely in their “anti-communitarian impulses”—might inaugurate new forms of relation. He writes,

Any perspective, direct or vicarious, would be to some extent exclusionary. Rather than deny or apologize for such exclusion, we might more profitably acknowledge them and then try to see the unexpected ways in which an unavoidably limited ‘I’ or ‘we’ also speaks outside its particular perspective. My “we” … is constantly crossing over into the territory of other “we’s.”

(Homos 8–9)

This constant crossing over is not assimilation or communion but rather the discovery of oneself already inaccurately replicated in the world. Nonetheless, while it might sound strange, I argue that Bersani’s inaccurate replication is a means or mode of conversion. Not in the sense of becoming something other than who or what one is, but of being converted to self via the discovery of formal and hence impersonal correspondences with other people and things with which one resonates but does not imitate or resemble, nor with which one identifies. Following this logic of likeness, in being like others one is more like oneself. This is conversion not via the logic of difference (i.e., of changing) but of sameness.²⁰

The likeness borne by incongruity is what is meant by the aesthetic, as it provides the syntax for thinking undivided being, a form of thinking that is neither that of philosophical abstraction, metaphysical speculation, or epistemological discursive language, but empirical sense and perception. This is because sense operates via the incongruous—because things in the world and our sense of them are not divided from the world, but are immanent to it, yet in ways that are not congruous (mastered and known) but incongruous (received and sensed).²¹

Bersani’s aesthetics of inaccurate replication (including in the specific form of the monochrome) is not about changing, but instead staying the same through conversion—it is about becoming more intensely what one is, via infinite correspondences of form or color, and through vibratory resonances with other bodies, places, and things in the world. Less than an image, incongruous affinities and aesthetic configurations are co-terminus (neither precedes the other), and likeness is the motor of their co-immanence. As Bersani and Adam Phillips have both argued, art is the principle means by which we partake in these ontological reconfigurations of forms. As Phillips puts it in his book On Wanting to Change, “the ingenuity of conversion was [is] in its enigmatic transformations … in conversion we are at our most artful” (24).

o

In 2017, artist Glenn Ligon curated an exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundations in St. Louis titled Blue Black. The title of the show was derived from the eponymous work by Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Black (2000; fig. 1).²² As Ligon describes it in his curatorial statement, “[t]he exhibition was conceived as a meander through blue and black, a meditation on the formal, political, and metaphysical ways the colors have been used, and an attempt to reveal the conversations artists have set up between them.” While interested in the politics of color, including in forms of racialization and racial identity, Ligon was also entering into an extended dialogue with Kelly’s career-long exploration of the impersonality and anonymity of color, in which color is not something artistically chosen or made, but exists, chromatically, as already-made.²³

The monochrome is a form of chromatic oneness, of color undivided from itself.²⁴ And yet, the monochromatic is not a uniformity of color, but instead perceptually operates via a non-identitarian and non-enigmatic sameness. Kelly’s vertically oriented Blue Black consists of two symmetrically arranged monochromatic blocks of color, one blue (on the top) and one black (on the bottom). As Jean-Luc Nancy states, color is not autonomous, but “is a form that needs something other than itself in order to exist” (54). As he goes on to say, “to distinguish one color from another, you need rupture, which is drawing in the general sense, that is to say the line” (54). The rupture of which Nancy speaks is the moment of incongruity, of a chromatic variance or shift that occurs from one color to another. It is the line that (non)divides blue and black, yet a line that is only traced as the incongruous conjuncture of that blue and that black form. “Color needs line in order to exist, but on the other hand, there is nothing visible without color. A colorless line is no longer a line” (54). The chromatic line is made from out of that shared edge, “belonging” to both and to neither blue and / nor black at once, there where the two colors are opened to the outside.²⁵ For as Nancy goes on to say, “[c]olor is an expression in the most literal sense: it’s the pressure outwards, a summons to the outside” (54). Through the incongruous juxtaposition of blue and black, Kelly and Ligon are chromatically and incongruously drawn together and co-exposed.

A color’s identity is demoted through the intensity of its monochromatic saturation, where the color begins to vibrate and resonate and comes to correspond with other colors, forms, surfaces, and things. It is in this way that, somewhat ironically, the monochrome is the lessening of color’s difference through the heightening of chromatic saturation and intensity, thereby resonating with the outside, becoming more than what it is and inaugurating an “aesthetic solidarity” via the chromatic (Tuhkanen, Speculative 74). The same incongruity of color is evident in Kelly’s other monochromatic diptychs and polyptychs, by which blocks of undivided color are brought together—noncompositionally, which is also to say, non-congruently. I want to suggest that here, too, we encounter the relation that Bersani sketched out, one of unfinished virtuality rather than actualized completion.

In Colors for a Large Wall (1951; fig. 2), one of Kelly’s earliest and now most iconic works, the monochromatic colors of each of the sixty-four square canvas panels are already made, having been found by the artist while living in Paris, in the form of the pads of colored construction paper familiar to French schoolchildren. For Kelly, these already-made colors only need to be impersonally replicated and need not be composed but incongruously configured. Yet this replication of color was inevitably inaccurate, accounting in this way for the singular intensity, density, and texture of any color—which is also to say, its plurality. As Nancy observes, “[t]he importance of texture can be understood if one tries for example to transfer the green of a tree leaf to a sheet of paper or a piece of cloth. On a different surface, the green changes its aspect, its gleam, its flesh” (54).²⁶

Note that these quotations of Jean-Luc Nancy on color derive from the series of conversations he had with Adèle van Reeth on the topic of “jouissance” or “coming,” and that this is one of the first signals of the unfinished virtuality of color, color’s event, movement, and vibrational intensity. Indeed, Nancy will say that “there is a rhythm of colors presented in painting. A painter’s palette [for Kelly, the colors found on it are impersonal and already unmade] expresses his [sic] rhythmic relationship to colors” (53). Color is the chromatic movement of a shared rhythm between bodies and surfaces, light and dark. Bersani and Dutoit see this rhythmic relationship as extending to the viewer or spectator and the latter’s body and presence in relation to the painting. Thus, as I have suggested above, this rhythmic rapport is shared between Ellsworth Kelly and Glenn Ligon, and between Kelly’s Blue Black and each of the other singular instantiations of that configuration of colors, in an exhibition, Blue Black, that in its “oneness” was articulated through the logic of incongruity: of blues, of blacks, and of each work in the exhibition with the others.

This is key for Bersani’s thinking against “immobilizing knowledge,” and stable, immobile aesthetic forms, including what he and Dutoit refer to as “a myth of blocked fusions … an art [that] legitimizes a comfortable belief that the movements constitutive of existence in real space … can be stopped” (Arts 102). In this respect, Kelly’s monochromes operate as forces of mobilization and resistance of empirical forms and bodies, the somatic attunement to others and the world that defines incongruous being in all its unfinished potential. As the authors argue, Mark Rothko (and, I suggest, Ellsworth Kelly) subverts the foreground-background distinction of pictorial composition through “the reduction of differences in hues” (Arts 106)—in Kelly’s case, specifically blues. This is a non-contrasting aesthetics of color; in other words, it verges on chromatic oneness or likeness as opposed to difference. In this de-differentiation of color lie “the conditions of uncertain readability that make problematic the tracing of boundaries in the space outside of art” (108)—a compositional ambiguity of things in space (i.e., aesthetic correspondence)—that affirms what the authors refer to as “the world’s uncertain visibility” (217, n.10).

Undoing the frame, Rothko and Kelly both undo the spaces of the presumed subject and its division from the world. Instead, as Bersani and Dutoit argue, the artists present the preparatory conditions to the making of a visible subject but not the visible subject itself (Arts 105). The painting or in Kelly’s case the wall sculpture, would then be the trace of this fore-scene, the coming-to-appear that otherwise, as the very transiting and transience of existence, eludes us. “[Rothko’s] art—perhaps like all art—renders concrete a coming-to-appear that, in our perception of appearances outside of art, we are always too late to perceive” (121).²⁷ Art is a primary instantiation of potentiality as always bearing the force of impotentiality, that is, that being need not be, and that in its being and becoming, being is always already unbecoming, thereby affirming the irreducible and ineradicable contingency and indeterminacy of existence. Bersani and Dutoit observe that “[p]erhaps only in art is the contingency of contingency materialized. Only in art do we see the contingent forms that map space almost not being traced” (121).

This is what the Rothko paintings in the Houston chapel perform, according to Bersani and Dutoit: the disappearance that is the source of the coming and becoming, that is, being’s infinite finitude. The aesthetic is a violation of the force of finitude, disappearance, and extinction. There are those (Rothko, Rauschenberg, González-Torres, to name a few) who take this force as their medium and technique and who have created works that are not aesthetics of disappearance or extinction but disappeared aesthetics and extinction aesthetics (as I have previously theorized), wherein not only visual perception but even the aesthetic is demonstrated to be irrelevant. One is left not with a fragment, or perhaps even a gesture or vestige, but the separated spacing that supports and refuses every gesture and vestige, or perhaps affirms what any gesture or vestige might be. As Henri Bergson says, “the very permanence of … form is only the outline of a movement” (qtd. in Ingold and Simonetti 19).

As we are aware, dark colors recede (retreat, move back and away from) and bright colors advance (approach and move forward) toward the viewer, due to the ways in which the human eye perceives and processes color (Bersani and Dutoit, Arts 94). In the works of Rothko and Kelly, this rhythmic back-and-forth of color is the mobility of forms (116), where colors and works float, making it difficult to locate “where forms have ‘stopped’” (111). Floating monochromatic colors are non-volitional in their vibratory movement toward multiple directions they “have not yet taken”: “They float because they have not ‘chosen’ the direction in which they will move” (111), and thus they are without end or goal. Having already noted the vibrational intensity of Kelly’s colors, I quote at length from Arts of Impoverishment on the undivided path of this non-directional movement:

The monochrome, in the vibratory intensity of its floating chromatic oneness, harkens back to a cosmic myth of the origin of light and color and form, “of space as nothing but undifferentiated light or the unadulterated intensity of a single color” (Arts 119). In the closing of intervals that otherwise structure distinctions and differences, there is nothing left to see, and no longer any place to which one is headed. There is, instead, a sense of oneness that may be the elimination of time and space, as we have come to metaphysically understand these conditions. As the authors describe: “Struck blind and immobilized: in the unbounded communications of universal identity, to be anywhere is to be already everywhere, and movement itself becomes superfluous when being is characterized by unconstrained mobility” (140). This immobility or stillness is what Bersani has named “spirit” or in at least one case, “spirituality” (143).

The sameness or likeness of Kelly’s Blue Black is partly due to the nearness of monochromatic color, of the monochrome as chromatic nearness—and oneness—that, as Plotinus defined nearness, stands apart qualitatively without interval. Bersani, Dutoit, Kelly, and Ligon occupy the same non-relational space (that is, non-divided, non-differentiated), a space of refraction (or diffraction, or perhaps simply “fraction” but not reflection). In Kelly’s Blue Black and Ligon’s exhibition, blue and black are affirmed as mutual intensifications of each other: so black that it’s blue, and so blue that it’s black. Chromatic saturation yields to chromatic indifferentiation, or what Moten has theorized as “blur.”³⁰

This is an aesthetic intuition shared with Barry Jenkins and what his film Moonlight (2016) does with black and blue in the context of rethinking race and racialization; identity and anonymity; temporality and sexuality.³¹ For me, as for Bersani, this proximity in which colors are cast as “almost identical” makes it “difficult to give a narrative account of that relation,” such that we can say that blue and black (Kelly’s, Ligon’s, Jenkins’s, and Bersani’s), are “related by nearly reflecting each other; they have no story to tell other than that of an inaccurate replication” (Arts 118). In my recent essay on Jenkins’s remarkable film, I discuss blue and black in terms of race, cosmology, masculinity, sexuality, and the (incongruous) chromatics of the kairos moment—that time and temporality when black becomes blue. The experience of the latter’s finitude is of a potentially infinite endurance, keyed to that transience and potential loss, neither to mourning nor melancholia, but rather to a different (non-psychological) ethical-aesthetic mode of being black, being blue. Blue black: where color is the light of darkness, as in the moonlight of Jenkins’ film, or Moten’s “deep midnight of category’s beyond,” or the twilight in a poem from Terrance Hayes’s collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, which reads, in part,

Probably twilight makes blackness
Darkness. And a gate. Probably the dark blue skin
Of a black man matches the dark blue skin
of his son the way one twilight matches another.

The sonnet opens with “probably,” which is then repeated four more times, with the last iteration being the one quoted above. A cadence of likelihood and uncertainty in the present tense marks the rhythm of the poem, which is equally interrupted by the past tense of “something happened” with the subject of each such event left unnamed, perhaps because, as the poem tells us, “The names alive are like the names / In graves.” Instead, the repeated acknowledgement that something happened is borne by the names of American cities:

The poem attests to the non-redemptive double valence of twilight, the crepuscular, that, as we read at the very opening of the poem, “probably … makes blackness dangerous / Darkness. …” and toward the end the poem, as quoted above, probably makes darkness not a predicate of blackness, but makes blackness as darkness, a gate. With the doubling of the word “matches,” we realize that it is through the incongruity of a chromatic likeness, “dark blue skin,” that a mobile space of passage—perhaps an exit, perhaps aporetic (or both at once)—is probable or likely. Yet clearly Hayes is getting us to think about how the generational inheritance of racialized violence that move across and is mapped “almost everywhere” might stop.

Curiously and importantly, this might call for a momentary cessation of movement, including of vision. This is a new kind of immobility of perception: not via the forced inscription of distinct boundaries and differences but “by the discovery of an unmodulated sameness that makes mobility superfluous” (Arts 120), and that might lead to “blocked vision,” the title of Bersani and Dutoit’s chapter on Rothko. For as the authors state, “[i]n a world where everything repeats itself”—that is, in a world of unlovable oneness—”there is perhaps no need to see” (137). Until that happens, we remain in a world full of commotion, generated by desires for congruent visions, images, and colors of difference.

John Paul Ricco is Professor of Comparative Literature, Visual Studies, and Art History at the University of Toronto, where he is Lead Curator of the Sexual Representation Collection at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. He is a theorist working at the juncture of contemporary art, queer theory, and philosophy, noted for his work on aesthetics and ethics; sexuality and intimacy; and eco-deconstruction. Ricco has coedited special issues of Parallax and Journal of Visual Culture on Jean-Luc Nancy, and most recently, a special issue of differences on Leo Bersani. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, and The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (both University of Chicago Press) and has just completed the third volume in his trilogy on “the intimacy of the outside,” titled Queer Finitude.

Notes

1. “Merde alors” was first published in October 13, 1980, pp. 22–35, and then republished twice, first in Stanford Italian Review, vol. 2, no. 2, 1982, pp. 82–95, and then nearly forty years after its original appearance in Receptive Bodies. All references to this essay will be to the final republished version in Receptive Bodies. I thank Eleanor Kaufman for the reference to the 1982 publication; and I want to thank both her and J. D. Rhodes for their incredibly insightful engagements with this material. See Kaufman; and Rhodes.

2. An early version of this essay was written as a short paper for “Unlovable,” the thirtieth annual Comparative Literature Conference, organized by graduate students at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, 24–25 March 2023. I want to thank Ben Koonar, William Hunt, and Julian Stuart, the student organizers, for the invitation to participate on the faculty roundtable, and to my copanelists and colleagues Barbara Havercroft and Haytham Bahoora, and members of the audience, for their questions and comments.

3. For a discussion of Christopher Bollas’s notion of non-repressed consciousness, in the context of Bersani’s engagement with Bollas, see: Tuhkanen, Speculative, 191ff.

4. For further discussion of the concept of incongruity in Bersani’s work, see my recent article, “Incongruity.” Some of that discussion will, by necessity, re-enter my discussion here.

5. For another stunning example of Bersani’s incongruous method, see his essay, “Force in Progress,” in Receptive Bodies, where he reads alongside each other, an anecdote told by analyst Susanne Hommel about an incident during her analysis with Jacques Lacan, Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, Kimberly Pierce’s film, Boys Don’t Cry, and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.

6. For a discussion of the role that the figure/figural (specifically in the work of Lee Edelman) and social recognition (specifically in the work of Judith Butler) has played in queer theory, see Tuhkanen, Speculative. For a theory of ethical-aesthetic sociality of the un-named, including the anonymity that lies in any name, see Ricco, “Commerce”

7. For a recent critical engagement with the censorious moralizing that pervades much of the contemporary political climate and its impact on the creation and reception of art, see Greenwell. While making a strong case for the ethical—indeed in his language “moral”—virtue of filth and that which is sexually discomforting, repellent, and offensive, Greenwell ultimately finds, as in his previous criticism and literary work, a form of theological—specifically apophatic—redemption in abjection, at various points speaking of the latter as “beatitudinal,” and being certain of filth’s literary figurations and syntactical configurations as “a formula for sainthood.”

8. As sexual creatures, “gay men make visible, and what straight spectators find so fascinating” [compelling and appalling, seductive and intolerable, at once] as Tuhkanen explains, “is the undoing of subjecthood itself, subjecthood that functions as the object and anchor for exercises of power” (Speculative 86). Paraphrasing Bersani’s argument in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Tuhkanen further explains that “behind homophobia is people’s terror and revulsion at the avidity with which (some) gay men submit to this jouissance, the deadly loss of control—la petite mort—that seduces us as a reminder of our aporetic origins”—this, opposite the destructive sociality of straight desire (141). For a rousing polemic on the deplorability of sex, see Davis and Dean.

9. “In the course of rather passively reflecting on some recognizably ‘significant’ topic (intimacy, the history of knowledge and of subjectivity, the relation between having sex and being social), I am often struck—it’s a kind of mental lightning effect—with what I know has to be the first sentence of my next piece of writing” (Bersani, “Broken” 415).

10. In an email interview with David Collard in 2013, McBride at one point speaks of “the moment just before language becomes formatted” (About 135).

11. In a talk given on June 26, 2014, Jacqueline Rose describes McBride’s novel as crafted not around “trauma as unspeakable,” but rather as “traumatized speech with no exit” (qtd. in Collard 221). And to quote Bersani and Dutoit, we might say that, through ungrammatical, truncated, and elliptical syntax, A Girl “keeps us from focusing directly on narrative centers of violence” (Receptive 10). Finally, my point about the unnarrativizable is meant to echo Bersani’s estimation of the value of psychoanalysis. He writes, “Psychoanalysis insists on speaking what can’t be spoken, on theorizing an inherently untheorizable bodily psyche” (Receptive 29).

12. Replacing “moments” with “words” in the following quotation, we can read Bersani’s critical estimation of the distinction of Robert Wilson and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s early work as equally applicable to McBride’s novel: “[n]o one moment in Wilson’s work seem[s] designed to be more dramatic or more significant than other moments” (Bersani, Future 281).

13. I want to acknowledge Mikko Tuhkanen’s recent attention to the disposition of “to the side” as it appears and functions in Bersani’s work, and Jacques Khalip for his formulation pertaining to that which is not or “never for us”—itself of an echo of Franz Kafka’s oft-cited comment that “there is hope, but not for us.”

14. In his review of the novel, Joshua Cohen writes about this tension between mobility and immobility: “McBride opposes her narrator’s unbridled fluency, which is her vitality, to the myriad forces—the family, nuns, priests and men, many men—that would arrest it into clauses, laws, rules and diagnoses, and it’s this opposition that provides the cohering drama.”

15. Laura Mulvey notes that “Sadism demands a story” (Tuhkanen, Speculative 178), while Wills writes: “A woman wanting an abortion has to be able to provide a legible narrative, to tell a good story” (20); and “You have to have a good story … even if that story is attenuated to almost nothing” (20–22).

16. Bersani and Dutoit write, “It is as if fascinated adherence … [is] finally, identical to a certain detachment” (Receptive 13). This is a “subversive passivity,” a “vertiginous passivity” [or receptivity or registration] and “non-imitative recognition” (Receptive 12, 13).

17. These sentences are also the opening to my essay, “Incongruity.”.

18. The opposite of this are personal correspondences, sovereign reflections, and reinforcements of the ego in its appropriating mastery of others and the world.

19. Bersani and Dutoit write that there is “a joke in nature itself, the joke of a frequent bad fit between the repertory of forms and the repertory of identities” (Forms 57).

20. To clarify, this is not personal narcissism but what Bersani and Adam Phillips theorize as homo-or impersonal narcissism that involves sameness “becoming more like itself” (Intimacies 82–86).

21. Being is incongruous. This has tremendous political and ethical implications, as when it comes to incongruous gender presentation; inter-racial couplings and racially “mixed” social subjects; serodiscordant sexual relations; differently abled bodies; the alliances of solidarity and coalition politics; and various things that prove not to be “mutually exclusive.” As the afterlife of the antisocial, incongruous sociality is exemplified by the dissatisfaction with assimilationist and separatist politics, and the liberal desire to be (for) inclusion; while also averse to the identical equivalencies advanced by mainstream gay and lesbian politics (“love is love”). Theoretically, and on an ecological register, incongruous ethics is opposite New Materialist congruences of the human and the nonhuman and the ontological flattening of categories.

22. We note that when more than one color appears in the title of a Kelly work, the names of the colors are not divided or separated by any punctuation marks such as a comma. This is yet another indication of incongruous chromatic oneness. This also corresponds to the complete lack of commas in McBride’s novel. In turn, the monosyllabic names of colors in Kelly’s titles are like the many monosyllabic words that populate McBride’s novel.

23. Because of Kelly’s aesthetic of impersonal or anonymous and already-made or found color and geometric abstraction, I see his works as being even better suited to Bersani’s aesthetics than Rothko. Following on Bersani’s deployment of Baudelaire’s non-Platonic notion of idealization, we can say that Kelly’s colors are idealized in the sense of opening onto an infinite series of aesthetic correspondences that exceed any predication or identity category, via incongruity, virtuality, and the unfinished.

24. In a recent review of Yve-Alain Bois’s art historical memoir, An Oblique Autobiography (2022), Hal Foster notes that “For Bois one modernist solution was to ‘abolish composition by suppressing division per se (the monochrome) or by adjusting this division so that it became an index of the surface in question (modular grid; symmetry; deductive structure; adequation of figure and field.’”

25. Following Fred Moten, we can say that this line of incongruity that marks the non-division of blue and black (what he will theorize as “blur”) is “to the side of compositional line” and “a way of making space against the edge of color” (227, 228).

26. To this comment by Nancy we can add Bersani and Dutoit’s own definition of the color green which is, they write, “never given [it’s not a primary color] but is the result of a process: not only of a blending of blue and yellow but also of a periodically renewed maturation in nature … Green is a color that becomes” (Arts 110).

27. As Ingold and Simonetti put it in their reading of Lucretius, “We mortals perceive the resultant forms, but not the movement that gives rise to them. That is why, as Lucretius explains, despite the veritable commotion of its material constituents, ‘the universe itself seems to be standing still’” (18). Here we might glimpse Bersani’s own thinking on stillness and mobility, and the distinction that he posits between matter that moves and spirit that is still. Yet in the case of the latter, this is a spiritual stillness opposite the immobilizing force of difference, instead of being a stillness that enables a sense of the infinite becoming of being as precisely the source, condition, and impossible-to-fully-experience force of existence. It is this force that stills us, just as it also propels us. In their work, artists present the simultaneity of this tension.

28. Train Landscape (1953) was inspired by a train trip that Kelly took in the fall of 1953 from Paris to Zurich, during which he discovered, in part thanks to the movement of the train through the countryside, an abstraction of empirical nature into three possible horizontal bands. The latter were then translated into the three panels of Train Landscape, based upon a series of tripartite diagrams that Kelly sketched in his notebook while on the way to Zurich, looking out the train window. What we might imagine Kelly saw and then was able to replicate, was a shift from movement to stillness, specifically what might be described as a monochromatic stillness (of the landscape as one moves through it), that in the form of the painting of sameness, likeness, or chromatic oneness does seem to imply the ultimate irrelevance of movement—a point I take up at the end of my essay.

29. This would seem to be in implicit contrast to Zeno’s paradox and its understanding that “the trajectory of a solid body, like an arrow in flight, can be resolved into an infinite series of fixed points” thereby famously raising the question, “how can it move at all?” (Ingold and Simonetti 22). What Zeno did not account for is the possibility that any moment might be the instant of a movement, and that there is momentum in each moment. For my own theorization of the momentum of the kairos moment, see “Mourning, Melancholia, Moonlight.”

Whereas Zeno abolishes motion via his observation of fixed points in space, Bersani hints at the abolishing of motion via the observation of the absence of spatial intervals or divisions. Yet like my own insistence (in the “Moonlight” essay) on there being momentum (or perhaps movement, or not) in any single moment, Bersani too, argues that the moment is vibratory and that in this shimmering vibration coheres a non-differentiated space of sameness or likeness—an incongruous relation that cannot be defined in terms of identity or any other form of predication.

30. In terms of the othering by racial categorization, something similar happened in Ligon’s curatorial project in St. Louis, as is represented in Andre Gide’s The Immoralist (1902): the inaccurate replication of forms, surfaces, and colors that serve impersonal desires between various racialized and non-racialized bodies. For Bersani’s discussion of the Gide novel, see Homos; and for a discussion of Bersani’s treatment, see Tuhkanen, Speculative 161ff. Just as Bersani thinks homosexuality without sexuality; here I want to think about color without racialization.

31. Anonymity (the name of no one name) is the nameless condition in which the many (name no one) is found in the one (the singular). Everything is like everything else, and epistemological discourse and naming point to an original moment (impossible to access) when any one thing did not have a name or was known by that name, but instead was simply an un-named existent. In our everyday experience, we encounter other things as existing without knowing what they are or their proper name (think of birding, or cruising).

In making this reference, we note that as a very young boy, and partly as a diversion from the speech impediment that he had developed, Ellsworth Kelly was introduced to birdwatching and this remained a favorite activity throughout his life. Birdwatching, and in particular the identification of species, relies upon the skill of discerning shapes and colors, something that is difficult to do oftentimes, from one bird to the next. For my earlier writing on the ethics and aesthetics of anonymity see: Chapter 1 “Name No One Man,” and Chapter 2 “Name No One Name,” in Ricco, John Paul. The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014; and Ricco, John Paul. “The Commerce of Anonymity.” Qui Parle 26, no. 1 (June 2017): 101–42.

Works Cited

• Bersani, Leo. Baudelaire and Freud. U of California P, 1977.
• –––. “Broken Connections.” PMLA vol. 125, no. 2, 2010, pp. 414–17.
• –––. “The Choreographed Cure.” A paper presented at the Provoking Attention Symposium, Brown University, 7 April 2017, YouTube, https://youtu.be/ywasRt-XHmg.
• –––. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. Columbia UP, 1986.
• –––. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature and Theatre. Little Brown, 1976.
• –––. Homos. Harvard UP, 1996.
• –––. “Introduction.” Civilization and Its Discontents, Penguin, 2002, pp. vii-xxii.
• –––. Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays. U of Chicago P, 2010.
• –––. “Merde alors.” Receptive Bodies, U of Chicago P, 2018.
• –––. Receptive Bodies. U of Chicago P, 2018.
• –––. Thoughts and Things. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Bersani, Leo, and Adam Phillips. Intimacies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
• Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Harvard UP, 1993.
• –––. Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture. Schocken, 1985.
• –––. “The Pregnant Critic.” Artforum, vol. 38, no. 3, 1999, pp. 124–25, 157.
• Bruner, Jerome S., and Leo Postman. “On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm.” Journal of Personality, vol. 18, no. 2, 1949, pp. 206–23.
• Cohen, Joshua. “Bloody Hell.” Review of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, New York Times, 19 Sept. 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/books/review/a-girlis-a-half-formed-thing-by-eimear-mcbride.html.
• Collard, David. About a Girl: A Reader’s Guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. CB Editions, 2016.
• Davis, Oliver, and Tim Dean. Hatred of Sex. U of Nebraska P, 2022. Provocations.
• Foster, Hal. “Bounce Off a Snap.” London Review of Books, 30 March 2023, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n07/hal-foster/bounce-off-a-snap.
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• Kelly, Ellsworth. Blue Black. Painted aluminum panels, 336 × 70 × 2 1/8 inches, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, 2000.
• Ligon, Glenn. Blue Black. Exhibition catalogue, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2017.
• Litvak, Joseph. “Seductive.” Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani, special issue of Differences, edited by Jacques Khalip and John Paul Ricco, vol. 34, no. 1, 2023, pp. 228–34.
• McBride, Eimear. A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. Simon and Schuster, 2014.
• Molesworth, Helen. “Helen Molesworth and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh on Gerhard Richter.” Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast, 24 April 2023, https://www.davidzwirner.com/podcast#/helen-molesworth-and-benjamin-hdbuchloh-on-gerhard-richter–special-episode–podcast-e9e9fada-e0d8-4c07-91abbb2a69a5a51d.
• Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Duke UP, 2017.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Adèle van Reeth. Coming. Fordham UP, 2016.
• North, Paul. Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness. Zone Books, 2021.
• Phillips, Adam. On Wanting to Change. Picador, 2022.
• Rhodes, John David. “Aestheticism.” Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani, special issue of Differences, edited by Jacques Khalip and John Paul Ricco, vol. 34, no. 1, 2023, pp. 14–19.
• Ricco, John Paul. “The Commerce of Anonymity.” Qui Parle, vol. 26, no. 1, 2017, pp. 101–42.
• –––. The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes. U of Chicago P, 2014.
• –––. “Drool: Liquid Fore-Speech of the Fore-Scene.” World Picture, vol. 10, Abandon, 2015.
• –––. “Incongruity.” Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani, special issue of Differences, edited by Jacques Khalip and John Paul Ricco, vol. 34, no. 1, 2023, pp. 156–64.
• –––. “Mourning, Melancholia, Moonlight.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 19, no. 2, 2019, pp. 21–46.
• Schwartz, Alexandra. “We’re Shaped by Our Sexual Desires. Can We Shape Them?” Review of Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, New Yorker, 27 Sept. 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/04/were-shaped-by-our-sexualdesires-can-we-shape-them.
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• –––. Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction. Bloomsbury, 2020.
• Wills, Clair. “Quickening, or How to Plot an Abortion.” London Review of Books, 16 March 2023, pp. 19–26.