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But I mean to honor the memory of that essay, to praise and not to bury it; to hail the rancor of its frank hatred of identity, and the fury of its applause during the scene of its undoing, the scene where, where, it is unfixed? No, no!: where it is demolished: how tinny, how thin, how programmatic queer theory's business-as-usual opposition to fixed identity can sound when it is set next to the voice of the take-no-prisoners prophet we hear in "Is the Rectum a Grave?"' how pale, how paint-by-number the sight of its unfixing can look next to the flames of the funeral pyre where Bersani stages its immolation. As with the enduring melancholia that Judith Butler has so finely explicated at the heart, as the heart of an identity—gay, lesbian, or queer—exemplary in its instability, a bracing sense of catastrophe, the feel of a hurricane nearby, underwrites Bersani's bestowing of flagship status to what he will call specifically gay identity as a social imposition whose undoing illuminates the vulnerability of all identity. Most important, I mean to honor Bersani's abidingly unpopular recognition that however much sex is put out in public, made the medium of some new and improved society, sex invokes an urge to get away from others as much as an urge to join with them. We can begin to remark the persistence of this urge in the very realm of public sex itself: anyone accustomed to the cultures of public sex in which Michael Warner and others place considerable hope knows full well the more or less articulated, more or less conscious, more or less courteous "involvement shields"—the averted or unanswering eye; the polite excuse; the turning of the back—thrown up in the face of the unpreferred object. But I do not mean to stop there: I am persuaded that the connection between sex and social withdrawal is as deep as Bersani says it is, as deep as that, but different, working through mediations whose particularities cannot be summarized as the perturbations of a single psychic catastrophe.

– Jeff Nunokawa, "Queer Theory: Postmortem" (2007)

#Jeff Nunokawa #Queer Theory #Leo Bersani #Monism #Postmorterm #Social Theory #Antisocial Thesis #Is the Rectum a Grave?#Queerness #Homos #⚒️

...Genet’s political radicalism is congruent with a proclaimed indifference to human life as well as a willingness to betray every tie and every trust between human beings. This is the evil that becomes Genet’s good, and, as if that were not sufficiently noxious, homosexuality is enlisted as the prototype of relations that break with humanity, that elevate infecundity, waste, and sameness to requirements for the production of pleasure. There may be only one reason to tolerate, even to welcome, Funeral Rites’s rejection (at once exasperated and clownish) of relationality: without such a rejection, social revolt is doomed to repeat the oppressive conditions that provoked the revolt.

– Leo Bersani, Homos (1996)

#Leo Bersani #Homos #Jean Genet #Antisocial Thesis #Gay #Queer #Funeral Rites #Radicalism #Politics #⚒️#💣#Anti-Relationality

…if these suspicions of identity are necessary, they are not necessarily liberating. Gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their sophisticated awareness of how they have been constructed as gay men and lesbians. The discrediting of a specific gay identity (and the correlative distrust of etiological investigations into homosexuality) has had the curious but predictable result of eliminating the indispensable grounds for resistance to, precisely, hegemonic regimes of the normal. We have erased ourselves in the process of denaturalizing the epistemic and political regimes that have constructed us. The power of those systems is only minimally contested by demonstrations of their “merely” historical character. They don’t need to be natural in order to rule; to demystify them doesn’t render them inoperative. If many gays now reject a homosexual identity as it has been elaborated for gays by others, the dominant heterosexual society doesn’t need our belief in its own naturalness in order to continue exercising and enjoying the privileges of dominance. Suspicious of our own enforced identity, we are reduced to playing subversively with normative identities—attempting, for example, to “resignify” the family for communities that defy the usual assumptions about what constitutes a family. These efforts, while valuable, can have assimilative rather than subversive consequences; having de-gayed themselves, gays melt into the culture they like to think of themselves as undermining. Or, having “realistically” abandoned what one queer theorist calls a “millennial vision” of domination’s demise, we resign ourselves to the micropolitics of local struggles for participatory democracy and social justice, thus revealing political ambitions about as stirring as those reflected on the bumper stickers that enjoin us to “think globally” and “act locally.”

– Leo Bersani, Homos (1996)