The couple is; the couple rarely are: this grammatical technicality would suggest that when we ask “what is a couple?” we are talking about two ones that have become a new one and thus should be addressed as an ontological unity. And yet, as the long history of feminist and queer accounts of the couple teaches us, to paraphrase Luce Irigaray, ce couple n’en est pas un. Haunted always by shadowy thirds—the affair, the ex, the second husband, the sister-in-law, the child, the coeditor—the couple, it would seem, far from merging into one, easily multiplies into three or more. Indeed, the very origins of queer theory might be traced to its capacious theorization of the third—whether through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reinterpretation of the erotic triangle of structural anthropology (in which the bond between same-sex rivals is observed to be stronger than that between lover and beloved), or Judith Butler’s reimagining of the oedipal triangle of psychoanalysis (in which the child’s gender and sexual identity arises through a complex interplay of desire and identification with the two parents). These two queer triangles can be seen to converge in one of the most influential, if controversial, texts of recent queer theory, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). What Edelman calls “reproductive futurism” describes the logic according to which the two figures—the Queer and the Child—perform a strange dance around the Couple, oscillating in and out of the position of the Couple’s third to perpetuate its neat symmetry. In No Future, as in much of queer theory, the Queer is a shadowy third that simultaneously troubles and constitutes the Couple. The Queer’s positive antipode, the Child, offers the Couple salvation from the Queer’s negation by promising hope and the restoration of meaning through its positivization of nothing into something.
In the following pages, we turn to four integers—one, two, three, and zero—to comprehend the shifting relationship between the Couple and the Queer. Taking cues from Edelman as well as recent Afro-pessimist scholarship, we approach the Couple not as a sociological category, but as a structure of being, and the Queer, not as an identitarian category but as a (non)ontological position. Surveying a series of key moments in the history of queer theory’s often implicit philosophizing about the couple, we construct a queer numerology that attends to the numerical patterns that characterize coupled relationality in different historical moments. As we propose, what feminist and queer theorists have historically taken to be ethically specious about the couple form has concerned its metaphysical tendency to either synthesize into one (thus eliminating the threat of difference) or produce queer thirds upon whose difference its sanctity depends.
from “The Ontology of the Couple, or, What Queer Theory Knows about Numbers” by S. Pearl Brilmyer, Filippo Trentin, and Zairong Xiang, GLQ 25:2 (2019)
