#queer negativity

For the person of color, the force of the historical-­racial schema, which is congruent with what I have been calling the erotic/phobic assemblage, consists in its capacity to explode one’s phenomenologically lived sense of one’s embodied capacities and potentials. In Fanon’s vivid phrasing, the result is “a hemorrhage that left congealed black blood all over my body.” Thinking through this image of bloody injury, we might issue a Fanonian rejoinder to [Tim] Dean: the historical-­racial schema is neither a disciplinary identity nor a stereotype from which we can be liberated by the fragmenting operations of erotic desire and sexual jouissance; it is an incoherent historical assemblage that proves, for people of color, directly and painfully shattering, with or without sex; even as, for white racial fetishists, it functions as the preferred instrument for an enjoyably temporary and much sought-­after erotic and ecstatic shattering of the self. These readings of racial fetishism should lead us to question the idealization, within psychoanalytic queer theory, of self-shattering jouissance as something beyond the political that dissolves the social identities on which political orders allegedly rest. Far from destroying social identities, racialized self-­shattering relies on incoherent histories of race, which it continually reanimates and reinvests with desire and erotic force. To put it bluntly: sexual self-shattering is not a utopian escape from the social order, but a method of its maintenance. Rather than being the Achilles heel of racist social orders, sexuality can operate as their lifeblood, reinvigorating and nourishing archaic fragments of racial history that might otherwise fall out of collective memory. In fact, I would argue that the source of sexuality’s negativity is less its fragmentation of corporeal and psychic integrity than its uncontrollable historicity—the ways in which its embodied imaginary is continually hurtling backward to violently oppressive historical and cultural pasts.

Of course, same-sex desire is not as impossible as it used to be; as a result, the survival of feelings such as shame, isolation, and self-hatred into the post-Stonewall era is often the occasion for further feelings of shame. The embarrassment of owning such feelings, out of place as they are in a movement that takes pride as its watchword, is acute. It is also hard to see how feelings like bitterness or self-hatred might contribute to any recognizable political praxis. Texts that insist on social negativity underline the gap between aspiration and the actual. At odds with the wishful thinking that characterizes political criticism, they are held accountable for the realities that they represent and often end up being branded as internally homophobic, retrograde, or too depressing to be of use. These texts do have a lot to tell us, though: they describe what it is like to bear a 'disqualified' identity, which at times can simply mean living with injury—not fixing it.

Without hesitation, queers shed the constrains of identity in becoming autonomous, mobile and multiple with varying differences. We interchanhed desires, gratification, ecstasies, and tender emotions without reference to the tables of surplus value of power structures. Muscled arms built barricades and broke shit to the imagined anthems of riot grrrls (or was it La Roux?). If the thesis is correct that gender is always performative, then our performed selves resonated with the queerest gender of all: that of total destroy. Henceforth our preferred gender pronouns are the sound of shattering glass, the weight of hammers in our hands and the sickly-sweet aroma of shit on fire. Address us accordingly.

Uncharitable fragments on fashionable “negativity” in left theory

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”. What is at stake in feminine being, as Lacan describes it, is the “bit of nonbeing at the subject’s core”, 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”, 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”. 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” or “assert and affirm subjecthood”. In offering nothing, however, jouissance affords the subject that which nothing else can: an “opening onto nonbeing (‘dèsêtre’) that … subtracts it from sense”. 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.

The warnings sounded by [Leo] Bersani and [Lee] 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”. 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” or on the sacrosanct value of the “dreams of difference” with which the subject must identify in order to give itself a form.

Of Gods...and Monsters