Book Reviews

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Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, ed., Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?
Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform
Oakland: AK Press, 2012, 232 pp. ISBN 978-1-84935-088-4

What a joy it is to read Mattilda Berstein Sycamore’s edited book (and not only
because it is a book without any footnotes!).
The book is a political call/call for the political (how could it not be!). And it is
and is not an academic book. And it surely invites the reader to rethink the bounda-
ries between the decorum of academe and the dirtiness of engagement; between the
intellectual fervent and affectual recognition; between words and emotions. Of reci-
procity of loving, tangible gestures. And in this spirit, this ‘review’ is more a loving
nod and essay of feelings and thoughts, rather than recommendation and/or critique
of the academic product.
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? is a skilfully crafted and composed
collection of essays about sex, melancholic longing, race, AIDS, gender and sexual
nonconformity, reflexivity, death, memories and fantasies. And fucking, a perfect
word capturing some of the threads, ideas, and pleasures of dangerous minds and
bodies. Beautiful bodies, ugly bodies, sexy bodies, bodies who fuck, bodies who are
dying, bodies who desire and who detest. These are bodies and minds who could
be considered ‘dangerous’ because they are, and they dare to be, who they are and
how they are – wilful, valiant, and often uncompromising in the pursuit of Self on
their own terms, rather than the dictates of majority society. As well as countering
majority society expectations, these daring bodies (let’s call them ‘queer’) also counter
norms within the minority groups (say, ‘LGBT’) to which they sometimes belong.
It is a book, amongst other things, about multiple, layered exclusions. But let us
not forget that it is also about the relations and strengths we form with each other.
Indeed, it is the book of powerful stories of relationships that empower us indi-
vidually and collectively, the powerful stories of relationships that help us survive
individually and collectively, the powerful stories of relationships without which we
become so fragile, so precarious and tangible. Individually and collectively, we are
with each other, we are through each other, we are because of each other. This is a
book about intimacy, respect, and individuality as it is rooted in and stems from the
collective, and about how the collective is and stems from individual openness of the
Self to the ‘Other’/the ‘other’ Self.
The book is also about longing: reciting to memorise in order to prevent it
(whatever the ‘it’ is for different authors) from fading away. The stories are like claws,
clutching at the past, and in the present of reading they compellingly demand your
attention like sharp nails biting into your skin. The voices are afraid of something(s)

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 Robert Kulpa
125 y
– but what? Perhaps of disappearing, once our bodies stop pumping the blood and
oxygen through their veins? Or of unfulfilled lives, dramatically cut through and
scattered into pieces of desperation once the blood tests return? Or maybe – in the
shadow of death – they are afraid of daily routine and meaningless lives? Or perhaps
they are not afraid at all, actively seeking barebacking – self-shattering, self-oblitera-
tion, self-understanding and self-reincarnation (too much reading of Leo Bersani and
Tim Dean, perhaps). But – one way or another, willingly or forcibly, phantasmagori-
cally or in boringly quotidian chores – isn’t death and the act of living with (and in
the shadow of) death, always a gesture towards the future, whatever that future might
be…?
In longing, there is also a melancholic thread of intergenerational dispositifs. If
you let them soak into your imaginary, these are stories you can take part in because
reading this book is not only an observing/reading of the ‘others’ from a distance
mediated by the lines of black letters on paper. In letting myself be open and exposed
to the voice, imaginary, philosophy, language and touch of the ‘Other’ (be it the
editor, an author, or a fictionalised character), reading this book was not a passive act,
but was more like an act of participation, a communion perhaps?
Of reciprocity of loving, tangible gestures – oh what a joy it is to read Why Are
Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?!
Robert Kulpa, Birkbeck College, University of London

Tiqqun, This Is Not a Program

Cambridge: MIT Press/Semiotext(e), 2011, 200pp. ISBN 978-1-58435-097-2

Tiqqun was a French journal published in 1999-2001. Part of the French Autonome
movement, it also engages with the Italian Autonomist tradition (Negri, Tronti…).
This Is Not a Program refers to Deleuze and Guattari, to Foucault, Heidegger and
Debord. The book is composed of two sections (‘This Is Not a Program’ and ‘As
a Science of Apparatuses’). Each section contains short chapters illustrated with a
photograph, according to an aesthetic device invented by the Surrealists (for instance
in Breton’s Nadja). This review will endeavour to summarise the main points of this
book before providing a discussion of some themes.
First, Tiqqun refutes Marxist class analysis:

To continue the struggle today, we will have to scrap the notion of class and
with it the whole entourage of certified origins, reassuring sociologisms, identity

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