[O]ne day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest of confessions from a shadow.
The above quote, the penultimate passage of the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, served as the epigraph to one of my final papers of the semester, a consideration of queer history within the context of counter-historical practice. Originally I'd planned this paper to excavate the origins of English (and American) blasphemy law during the Restoration, but I happened to read about a certain rift in queer studies between folks who might be called anti-historicists or anti-teleologists (Madhavi Menon and Jonathan Goldberg in particular) and semi-historicists or -teleologists (David Halperin, at least his recent work, and Valerie Traub, who has a big piece on this debate forthcoming in PMLA) and I thought I might have something to add to the conversation. Because this paper was for a class on early modern cultural studies, I offered a tentative counter-historical reading of Shakespeare's male-addressed sonnets that explores the implications of "pre-modern" same-sex sexual pleasure for our present, modern, discursive-identitarian formation of "sexuality." I'll be adding to and revising this paper over the next weeks and months and I hope to bring it to a conference soon.
The other paper I did to cap off the semester wasn't really a paper at all but two close readings, the first of a portion of Agamben's The Sacrament of Language, the second of Benjamin's "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man." In both readings I was primarily concerned with the authors' analysis of the possibilities that language has for political or social action; together it was an immensely generative exercise.
The remainder of January—the CUNY Graduate Center doesn't resume classes until the 28th or so—I'll be working on a paper I'm giving at the ACLA conference in Toronto in April called "Haunted Time and Aesthetic Education: Gramsci, Spivak, and Novel Ghosts," in which I seek to work out Gramsci's theory of aesthetic education, and Spivak's re-reading of it in her newest book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, as they might pertain to two globally engaged novels, Pamuk's Snow and Aslam's The Wasted Vigil. As I don't know Turkish, I'll probably be concentrating more on the latter novel, a fascinating geopolitical fiction set in Afghanistan during the ongoing American occupation, but shot through, sometimes literally, with ghosts of the U.S.-Soviet conflict there in the '80s, and also of the region's long heterogeneous history. The undercurrent of this paper seeks to address current questions of world literature or global literature, and who can speak through or by literature.
But the first of my projects this month is the MLA conference in Boston, to which I head tomorrow for a few days. This will be my first time—looking forward!