Queer Beyond Repair: Psychoanalysis and the Case for Negativity in Queer of Color Critique

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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