Beyond the Grave

Austin Svedjan (bio)

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

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

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

The Citational Gimmick

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

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

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

(33–34)

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

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

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

Not Your Daddy’s Antisocial Thesis

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

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

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

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

(“Rigorously” 280)

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

Antisocial Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(8)

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

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

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

(“Rigorously” 282)

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

2. See Bernini; and McCann and Monaghan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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