POSTMODERN CULTURE

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, […]

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 […]

Bobby Benedicto (bio) Abstract This essay offers a critical examination of the established opposition between queer of color critique and the antisocial thesis. It challenges the widely rehearsed claim that the ethics of negativity associated with the antisocial thesis is premised on a position of (white gay male) privilege and questions the corollary, conceptual alignment of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]