#queer negativity

[antirelation]

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.

Kadji Amin, from Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History

[orpheusdrinkinga40inadeathbasket]

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.

Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

[myownprivatehumanzoo]

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.

Aiden Rowe - My Preferred Gender Pronoun is Negation

[baroquespiral]

Uncharitable fragments on fashionable “negativity” in left theory

>you’re not expressing solidarity with Third World labourers who suffer things you can’t imagine to survive, you’re expressing solidarity with bored white kids on /pol/ who just want a nuclear war already >how, in Current Year, can you possibly build an entire theoretical framework around catastrophe as a figure rather than an impending reality?  how is the academy so fucking slow that people are still responding to ‘90s banalities with cheeky album artwork of planes crashing into the World Trade Centre >actually, for that matter, same goes for using “madness” as a figure when 1 in 5 Americans are mentally ill >you people put a lot of stock in what other people say.  every other “critique” is like “oh shit this guy in Silicon Valley said something that sounds like something this academic said now we have to say the opposite thing” does it not occur to you that everyone in Silicon Valley is full of shit and so are academics >the distinction really has to be made between negativity as a quality and negativity as a function, even if it’s a non-dialectical, asymmetrical one.  because a lot of stuff that basically affirms the negative ends up being identical with the most radical forms of pure affirmation (actually a lot of radical uwu positivity stuff on here was earlier framed as radical negativity by Zizek, whose ostracism from the left over the one fascist thing he said that also happened to threaten a specific present neoliberal economic policy would be a lot more satisfying if everyone else wasn’t churning out cheap rehashes of his ideas) >literally fnords >IIRC all the poets who act inexplicably smug about the claim that poetry doesn’t do anything like this stuff, which is like Figure 1 of theory that could benefit from reading more literature without an overtly theoretical lens >multiple times I was reading Dark Deleuze and was like “does this figure just mean ‘don’t vote for the Democrats’ or does it mean ‘all radical communities should be like Tumblr where nobody has any chill and everyone’s constantly hurting each other’” and I know that’s just my autism but then where does autism fit into the romanticized madness schema anyway >Lee Edelman’s No Future is the Tragic Queers of Theory >Dark Deleuze is the My Immortal of Theory >I’m forgetting something >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHd3xfDzTg8

[antirelation]

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.

Bobby Benedicto, from Queer Beyond Repair: Psychoanalysis and the Case for Negativity in Queer of Color Critique

[shinygemstone]

QUEER NEGATIVITY BEAM LINE GO DOWN

[antirelation]

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.

Bobby Benedicto, from Queer Beyond Repair: Psychoanalysis and the Case for Negativity in Queer of Color Critique

[fish-egg-kun]

Of Gods...and Monsters

“Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn’t be much more amusing if we were all devils, no nonsense about angels and being good.” —Dr. Pretorius, “Bride of Frankenstein”

Had the opportunity to rematch some of the Universal Frankenstein movies last week as part of an attempt to immerse myself in Horror this coming Spooky Season. The high 70s temperatures around me do not project a very spooky vibe, though I suppose the thought of global warming is the most frightening thing of all.

I had not realized—watching these movies as a 16 year old egg—how fucking gay they are. James Whale famously kept his homosexuality an open secret in the 20s and 30s, and there is a slight queer edge to the first Frankenstein movie. The queer edge to Bride of Frankenstein is more of a bludgeon.

The plot (and deviations from the original novel) is well known. Baron Henry Frankenstein is holed up in his castle/laboratory working to reanimate life. He succeeds, but the monster is a violent menace. The ostensible reason given by the film is a kind of phrenology where Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant accidentally grabs the wrong type of brain: a ‘deviant’ brain from a condemned criminal. In actuality, from the moment the creature can move, he is shown nothing but cruelty by the very man who most ought to show him love. The monster ends up escaping and ostracized from society. At the very time Henry Frankenstein is at his wedding, we see the monster throw a little girl into the water where she drowns. The lonely monster fading back, replaced by a soon to be consummated wedding…the exile from heteroreproductive society. Yes, dear reader, I say it—Frankenstein’s Monster is queer.

Queer in the sense put forth by Lee Edelman. Queer in that he sticks out against the politics of the future. The monster cannot reproduce, he has no mate, he harms children (that he didn’t know what he was doing is never once considered), and in the end he is trapped in a building and burned down by a mob. The shots of Karloff’s monster running panicked amidst the flames exerted a pathos over me that, on my first watch, ten years earlier, I did not feel. To be fair to myself, I was mostly furious at the deviations from the original novel.

If this queer reading seems in any way a stretch I dare the reader to sit through an hour and fifteen minutes of Bride of Frankenstein (Universal Monster movies have in their favor extremely fast and concise pacing). Bride is the missing link between Henry Frankenstein as doomed promethean (Shelley’s novel and the first movie) and the amoralist of the later Hammer films. Dr. Pretorius is the successful seducer here. Ernest Thesiger brings a camp sensibility to the character that fits well in this first horror comedy (which opens with the comical murder of the dead girl’s parents from the first film). Dr. Pretorius almost leers over the baron throughout the film—‘Henry’ he calls him affectionately.

"You think I'm mad. Perhaps I am. But listen, Henry Frankenstein. While you were digging in your graves, piecing together dead tissues, I, my dear pupil, went for my material to the source of life. I grew my creatures, like cultures, grew them as nature does, from seed."

Against the cozy sentimentality of of the Baron's domestic housing, Dr. Pretorius follows asexual nature. He grows his creations; tiny individuals which he keeps all bottled up. There is a King, a Queen, a Priest, and a Devil. All the trappings of religiosity grown and put on a shelf. Grown from cultures, of course, nature—the Divine Sophia—growing, pulsating, producing all on its own. Those lines from Whitman: "Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world"

As a kid, missing all this context, what I most loved was the poignant scene with the blind old man (brilliantly parodied in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein). Finally ,the movie gave the monster a voice, as we watch him stutter out “Made me from dead. I love dead... hate living.” I dare say that the end of the movie, where the monster sacrifices himself to save Henry Frankenstein and his wife, is a disappointment. Our hero escapes the seductions of Pretorius and gets to marry the girl. Ew.

And of course...the Monster's Bride...Elsa Lanchester jerks her head as she looks around like a lizard. Again a very stark, antihumanist look and feel to the whole movie. And even she won't be with the monster.

As a sidenote. The original script had a scene where the monster ran through a graveyard to a crucifix and attempted to remove the body of Christ. That scene was censored for fear of upsetting one’s religious sensibility.