Afterword: The Unkillable Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory

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.

Works Cited

• Ashtor, Gila. Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia. Fordham UP, 2021.
• Bersani, Leo. The Culture of Redemption. Harvard UP, 1990.
• –––. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. Columbia UP, 1986.
• –––. Homos. Harvard UP, 1995.
• –––. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, edited by Douglas Crimp, MIT P, 1988, pp. 197-222.
• –––. “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. BFI, 2004.
• Butler, Judith. Who’s Afraid of Gender? Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024.
• Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological. Translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett. Zone, 1989.
• Caserio, Robert L. “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory, forum in PMLA, vol. 121, no. 3, 2006, pp. 819-21.
• Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. MIT P, 2002.
• Cruz, Ariane. “Playing with the Politics of Perversion: Policing BDSM, Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality.” Souls, vol. 18, nos. 2-4, 2016, pp. 379-407. Taylor and Francis Online.
• Davis, Oliver, and Tim Dean. Hatred of Sex. U of Nebraska P, 2022.
• Dean, Jon Todd, Jens De Vleminck, David Lichtenstein, Avgi Saketopoulou, Steven Miller, Jakob Staberg, Marcus Coelen, Tim Dean, Cecilia Sjöholm, Adrienne Harris, Patricia Gherovici, Jamieson Webster, and Ilka Quindeau. Lacan-Laplanche Debate 2016, special section of Division|Review, vol. 17, 2017, pp. 44-62.
• Dean, Tim. “The Antisocial Homosexual.” The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory, forum in PMLA, vol. 121, no. 3, 2006, pp. 826-28.
• –––. Beyond Sexuality. U of Chicago P, 2000.
• –––. “Foucault and Sex.” After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Lisa Downing, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 141-54.
• –––. “An Impossible Embrace: Queerness, Futurity, and the Death Drive.” A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy, edited by James J. Bono, Tim Dean, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Fordham UP, 2008, pp. 122-40.
• –––. “Sameness without Identity.” Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious, 2002, pp. 25-41.
• De Lauretis, Teresa. Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• –––. “Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future.” Queer Bonds, special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, edited by Damon Young and Joshua J. Weiner, vol. 17, nos. 2-3, 2011, pp. 243-63. Duke UP.
• Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson, U of Chicago P, 1981.
• Edelman, Lee. “Antagonism, Negativity, and the Subject of Queer Theory.” The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory, forum in PMLA, vol. 121, no. 3, 2006, pp. 821-22.
• –––. Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. Duke UP, 2023.
• –––. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004.
• Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley, Random House, 1986. Vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality.
• –––. An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Random House, 1978. Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality.
• –––. “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will.” Translated by Brendan Lemon, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1 of The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, edited by Paul Rabinow, New P, 1997, pp. 157-62.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works, vol. 14, 1914-1916, of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., edited and translated by James Strachey, Hogarth, 1954-1974, pp. 109-40.
• –––. “Negation.” The Ego and the Id and Other Works, vol. 19, 1923-1925, of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., edited and translated by James Strachey, Hogarth, 1954-1974, pp. 233-39.
• –––. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality, and Other Works, vol. 7, 1901-1905, of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., edited and translated by James Strachey, Hogarth, 1954-1974, pp. 123-245.
• –––. “The Unconscious.” On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works, vol. 14, 1914-1916, of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., edited and translated by James Strachey, Hogarth, 1954-1974, pp. 159-204.
• Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. Translated by Daniella Dangoor, Duke UP, 1993.
• Hyppolite, Jean. “A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s Verneinung.” Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by John Forrester, Cambridge UP, 1988, pp. 289-97. Vol. I of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan.
• Laplanche, Jean. Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006. Edited by John Fletcher, translated by John Fletcher, Jonathan House, and Nicholas Ray, International Psychoanalytic Books, 2011.
• –––. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• –––. “The So-Called ‘Death Drive’: A Sexual Drive.” British Journal of Psychotherapy, vol. 20, no. 4, 2006, pp. 455-71. Wiley Online Library.
• Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Norton, 1973.
• Marriott, David S. Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
• Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU P, 2009.
• –––. “Thinking beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer Critique.” The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory, forum in PMLA, vol. 121, no. 3, 2006, pp. 825-26.
• Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard UP, 1982.
• 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.