On the State of Contemporary Queer Theory

Eric Aldieri (bio)
DePaul University

A review of Ruti, Mari. The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. Columbia UP, 2017.

The term queer theory is usually attributed to Teresa de Lauretis, who used it at a 1990 conference on gay and sexuality studies at UC Santa Cruz. Judith Butler, David Halperin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Michael Warner and others took up this theoretical torch and constituted an original nexus of queer theory, working out of Foucauldian and Lacanian traditions among others. Texts from Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) to Warner’s The Trouble with Normal (1999) were published in quick succession, endowing queer theory with an official seat in academia that has definitively outlived the 1990s. Since this initial renaissance in theory, however, scholars and critics have pronounced queer theory “dead” multiple times – so often, in fact, that it has become harder and harder to take each successive eulogy seriously. While the original interest in and shock factor associated with early iterations of queer theory has arguably died down, a new nexus of scholars has emerged, working at the crossroads of affect theory, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and decolonial theory, and infusing the original interests and methodologies of queer theory with newfound focuses on everyday life, sovereignty, pleasure, temporality, affect, and – perhaps above all – negativity. Mari Ruti takes these recent developments in queer theory as the starting point for her 2017 The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. Her book serves at once as an exegetical introduction to contemporary debates in queer theory, a polemical critique of the assumptions that underpin the discipline and its rhetorical flare, and an original contribution to Lacanian scholarship. Praising, critiquing, and working with her many interlocutors – including Lee Edelman, Jasbir Puar, Jack Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, José Esteban Muñoz, Lynne Huffer, and Judith Butler – Ruti’s The Ethics of Opting Out serves as a pointed and honest introduction to the contemporary state of queer theory and its psychoanalytic cousins.

Ruti introduces her book by quoting Heather Love: “Resisting the call of gay normalization means refusing to write off the vulnerable, the least presentable, and all the dead” (1). She situates this call to “resist gay normalization” on the side of queer theorists and activists who, in contrast to “mainstream lgbtq activists,” insist that normalization – particularly through institutions of Western liberal democracy – has promoted the erasure of queer lives and histories. In Ruti’s words, “queer theory’s stance of negativity offers a resounding No!” to neoliberal cultural tropes of positivity, inclusion, and domestication, “essentially rebelling against the sugarcoating and depoliticization of life, including queer life, in contemporary American society” (3). Ruti is largely aligned with queer theory’s general refusal of neoliberal capitalism’s invitation, but part of her critical impetus in The Ethics of Opting Out is to contextualize this No! – to show that it is a No! in response to particular biopolitical regimes of violence, exploitation, and alienation, and not a refusal of life itself. Thus, while Ruti operates under the assumption that most (if not all) contemporary queer theory advocates for some form of negativity, her exegetical task in The Ethics of Opting Out is to delineate precisely what forms of negativity are at work in the field, how they differ, and what stakes are involved in each form. Each chapter traces a series of ongoing debates in the field: relationality versus antirelationality, Lacan versus Foucault, white gay men versus “the rest of us,” constitutive lack versus circumstantial lack, and more. While Ruti insists that these differences provide an introductory map of queer theory texts since 2000, she is also clear that they are only meant to be used as guides. The topology of queer theory remains more complex than each differentiation initially implies – and perhaps one of the main takeaways from The Ethics of Opting Out is that these supposed binaries (which are broadly accepted by many scholars in the field, at least schematically) are far more delicate than one might initially assume. Each chapter contains exegetical, polemical, and original work, and Ruti maneuvers fluidly from one task to another. This makes her book readily accessible for first-time readers of queer theory, because the material is made immediately relevant and contextualized in an undecided, ongoing field of discourse. In chapter three, for example, she gives an overview of queer temporalities and utopianisms by restaging the debate between Lee Edelman and José Esteban Muñoz, which took place through and after the publications of No Future (2004) and Cruising Utopia (2009) respectively. While Edelman finds that all utopianism falls into the liberal traps of patience, hope, and political investment, Muñoz insists on the future-oriented ideality of queerness. Rather than playing the role of disinterested moderator in this restaged debate, Ruti sides with Muñoz, claiming that “‘the future’ has never been the province of all children,” as Edelman’s critique of the Child seems to imply (91). Queer utopianism demands that queer and racialized children have a claim on and access to a future of their own. In short, only those who have a future are able to reject it as emphatically as Edelman does.

Ruti follows a similar pattern in chapter four, where Edelman again serves a primary role – this time in the debate between himself and Lauren Berlant in Sex, or the Unbearable (2013). Ruti traces the role of lack in queer theory by using this little book as a microcosm for larger disagreements between “white gay men” and “the rest of us.” If antirelational Lacanians like Edelman “tend to emphasize the constitutive role of negativity in human life” shaped by one’s originary alienation from the mother/from the real, then “those on the social side of the debate tend to focus on more circumstantial and context-specific forms of negativity, wounding, decentering, and suffering,” as Berlant does in Cruel Optimism (131). As a Lacanian scholar herself, Ruti appreciates Edelman’s emphasis on constitutive lack. Nonetheless, she is refreshingly frank in siding ultimately with Berlant, noting that “there is a willful blindness to Berlant’s basic point, namely, that there is a difference between life ‘not working’ in the ontological-existential (constitutive) sense and life ‘not working’ in the circumstantial (context-specific) sense” (137). Simply put, there is no reason why queer theorists (or anyone) should feel compelled to delegitimize one form of lack at the cost of the other. Both constitutive and circumstantial lack, universal and context-specific wounding play crucial roles in the everyday life of particular political subjects, and the two “are intimately related in the sense that it is often through circumstantial experiences of wounding that we are brought face to face with our constitutive wounding” (131).

While these examples offer the best exegetical-critical moments in The Ethics of Opting Out, Ruti’s accompanying polemics can rely on reductive versions of her interlocutors. If the rhetorical flare of queer theory is a critical target for Ruti throughout the text, it also seems as though she slips into a similar performative-imperative at certain moments. While deeply critical of Edelman throughout the book, Ruti remains generous and delicate in her representation of his work (perhaps because they share a Lacanian background). The same cannot be said in relation to her treatment of Judith Butler, Jasbir Puar, and Jack Halberstam. In chapter one, Ruti portrays Puar as the Deleuzian representative in queer theory. This characterization is not too far off; Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages explicitly works within a generally Deleuzian framework of affect and assemblage. However, Ruti takes Puar’s analysis of the terrorist body in Terrorist Assemblages to “elevate the suicide bomber… to an icon” of queerness (32). While Puar does recognize the fact that suicide bombing “is a modality of expression and communication for the subaltern” (218) – which, I think, is an almost inarguable characterization – she by no means idealizes this method of communication. And while the terrorist body is constructed and represented as queer due to neo-colonial and orientalist modes of discourse that have gained new life with the advent of homonationalism, I do not take Puar to claim that the terrorist body should represent a queer ideal of resistance. In other words, I believe perspectivalism is at work in Puar’s book, and Ruti fails to consider that in her polemic (at least in print). Instead, she interprets descriptive moments prescriptively, hindering a robust understanding of Puar’s stakes and framework and causing her critique of Puar to remain on the surface level. While Ruti’s polemical critique of Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure is more precise, similar concerns arise in relation to what should be read prescriptively, and what should be read descriptively. Perhaps this ambiguity is more Halberstam’s failure than Ruti’s, but polemical style nonetheless comes at the cost of intellectual generosity in this section.

Ruti’s treatment of Judith Butler in chapter two is similarly lacking. While many thinkers have reasonably critiqued Butler for what they see as an over-emphasis on relationality, Ruti goes so far as to claim that Butler maintains a “rejection of everything that even hints at agency” (55), and “pathologizes opting out of relationality even in cases when it is the least pathological course of action,” such as when one finds oneself in an abusive relationship (82). Both of these characterizations tend to reduce Butler’s performative and ethical theories to caricatures, and neither seriously contends with the thought of a vastly influential figure in queer theory. The other polemical critiques in the book are humble, precise, and refreshing. Slowing down the momentum of posthumanist influences on queer theory, Ruti questions some of the inherited tropes of the discipline – do we really want to abolish the subject completely? Are rights and enlightenment reason all bad for queer people? Is our “neoliberal” moment “uniquely traumatizing”? And can’t we think of alternative potentialities for a new universal ethics? Ruti doesn’t disagree with most of the critiques of rights discourse, reason, or universality. She gives fair attention to the maladies wrought by these systemic norms. But she also illustrates how these institutions have helped queer people in the recent past, and makes a case for preserving certain aspects of them. Once again, the takeaway is that the No! of queer theory, even when axiomatic, still needs to be justified every now and then – or else we risk making antinormativity into a new norm. Pressing this node, Ruti’s main critical intervention proves both timely and important.

Finally, nestled within the exegetical and polemical moments of The Ethics of Opting Out is a clear, provocative, and well-timed contribution to Lacanian theory. With Edelman as her foil throughout, Ruti looks to a number of less-read seminars to develop a Lacan of creativity and relationality (particularly seminary VII on the ethics of psychoanalysis, to which the book’s title may allude). While queer theory is most familiar with Edelman’s Lacan, Ruti seeks to provide an alternative reading that nicely complements readings by other “relational” theorists, such as the field’s Foucauldians. (She eventually argues that the Lacanian real is similar to Foucault’s notion of an archaic self, and thus, that the separation between queer theory’s Lacanians and Foucauldians is largely counterproductive.) She begins by taking Edelman to task for his reading of Antigone’s “act” as a purely selfish act of suicidal jouissance. Instead, Ruti notes that Antigone “defies Creon not for her own sake but for the sake of her dead brother Polyneces” (55), beginning to bridge the gap between Butler’s Levinasian ethics and Edelman’s solipsistic anti-ethics. Ruti then highlights the gifts that alienation grants us by (dis)placing beings into the symbolic order. Of course, we become detached from the primal Thing, and can only fully reunite with it through a suicidal act of transgression, but we also gain from this separation: the creative power of language, subjective identification, the dynamics of joy and frustration inherent to desire, and more. Ruti looks toward Lacan’s later seminars in order to suggest that he “no longer sees language and jouissance as mutually exclusive” at this stage in his thought, and instead suggests “that the signifier transmits jouissance to the extent that it carries traces of the real” (117). Our constitutive lack prompts signification, and thus prompts us to carry traces of the real into the symbolic order in the form of “modified” or sustainable jouissance. If Edelman’s Lacan insists on a pursuit of jouissance through a celebration of the death drive, then Ruti raises the possibility of a “modified jouissance” implied by desire, language, art, and the mundane objects that each pursues (74). In other words, if Edelman’s Lacan insists on a complete reunification with the primal Thing, Ruti counters this insistence by looking toward “object echoes” of the Thing – bits of jouissance that prove less intense but far more sustainable through the trenches of intelligible, everyday life. For Ruti, “Edelman’s attempt to purge Lacanian theory of its relational elements leads to an overvalorization,” and eventual masculinization, “of the subject’s solipsistic jouissance” at the expense of these modified yet sustainable attachments (81).

Later, Ruti brings the psychoanalytic thought of Herbert Marcuse into conversation with Lacan in order to explicate the (always potentially) critical aspects of desire. While Edelman dismisses desire as catering to the demands of capitalism (consume and never be satisfied!), Ruti notes that “one could just as easily say that desire takes a critical attitude toward the world precisely by wanting ‘something more,’ by refusing to be satisfied with the status quo of the here and now” (101). In these terms, the trick of Lacanian analysis would be to free desire from its capitalist prison, and allow it to pursue the object-echoes made possible by relationality, which constitutes part of Lacan’s goal in formulating an ethics of psychoanalysis. Amidst the specifics of Lacanian theory, Ruti clearly defines terms for readers unfamiliar with Lacan’s vocabulary, including concepts such as “sinthome,” “subjective destitution,” and “quilting points.” The Ethics of Opting Out is suited both for veterans and for newcomers to the fields of queer theory and psychoanalysis.

While The Ethics of Opting Out includes some reductive representations and unwarrantedly polemical critiques, it also serves admirably as both a general introduction and a significant, original contribution to a field of study. Ruti’s clarity, frankness, and humor shine through, and should make The Ethics of Opting Out recommended reading on any queer theory syllabus.

Works Cited

• Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke UP, 2007.