The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory

Author(s): Robert L. Caserio, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz and Tim
Dean
Source: PMLA, Vol. 121, No. 3 (May, 2006), pp. 819-828
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486357
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12 1.3
j

Forum: Conference Debates

The Antisocial Thesis inQueer Theory

The AntisocialThesis inQueer Theory
819 Robert L. Caserio
MLA Annual Convention
821 Lee Edelman
27 December 2005, Washington, DC
Judith Halberstam
823
Program arranged by theDivision on Gay Studies inLanguage and Literature
825 jose esteban munoz

826 Tim Dean

The Antisocial Thesis inQueer Theory
Are We Postcolonial? Post-Soviet Space "Should a homosexual be a good citizen?" Leo Bersani asked inHomos in
828 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY 1995, expressing a gay skepticism thathas dogged everyupsurge of gay poli
Spivak tics. Bersani's results from his diagnosis of "the rage for respectability
doubt
Nancy Condee ... in gay life that rage in postmodern
today." He
829 locates dissolutions of gay

831 Harsha Ram in clamors for gay marriage and gay parenting, in queer antisep
identity,
VlTALY CHERNETSKY of gay sex. "Useful Homos result from
833 ticizings thought," suggests, might
the compatibility of homosexuality with civic service." And
"questioning
from questioning more: Bersani makes a claim about social itself. He
being
"that homo-ness ... necessitates a massive of rela
hypothesizes redefining

tionality,"that it instances "a potentially revolutionary inaptitude?perhaps

inherent in gay desire?for as it is known." If there is
sociality anything
indispensable" in it is its "politically unaccept
"politically homosexuality,
able" opposition to community. Thus Homos formulates what
paradoxically
might be called "the antisocial thesis" in contemporary queer theory.
Bersani's formulation and others like it have a decade of ex
as a feature of inspired
Appearing occasionally
plorations of queer unbelonging. Meanwhile, pace scholarship, gay rage for
the Forum, "Conference Debates" sum
normalizing sociability?to judge by the gay-marriage boom alone?has in
marizes the discussions that emerged
tensified. Given such divergent I to my
at recent controversial conference ses developments, suggested colleagues
sions. Panel participants are invited to on theMLA's Division Executive Committee forGay Studies in Language
submit brief accounts of their positions and Literature that stocktakingof the antisocial thesismight be inorder.An
in the lightof the ensuing conversation. MLA convention in could assess from
panel Washington scholarship's gains
Panels for "Conference Debates" are se the thesis and where the thesismight be headed. Itmight considerwhether
lected by the PMLA Editorial Board. such as Homos 's justly connect of gay-rights
arguments suspicion politics

? 2006 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 8l9

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820 Forum:ConferenceDebates PMLA

with subversion of "sociality as it is known." It tutes for

religion's promises. The substitutes share
could ask if the antisocial thesis hedges its bets an infantilebelief in the life to come. In contrast,
(consider Bersani s use of homos, Edelman makes one think, are grown-up
"potentially," "perhaps,"
and "as it is known" in the citations above). It to face
enough mortality.
might probe the adequacy of evidence for the anti But just how empirical an American reality
social thesis that isdrawn fromaesthetic artifacts. isNo Future in touchwith? One ofDean's strong
Taking on such questions, Tim Dean, Lee contentions is that Edelman, or the antisocial the

Edelman, JudithHalberstam, and JoseMufioz sis generally,does not distinguish structuralclaims

signed on to the panel, and delivered strongly about the unconscious from empirical claims about

thoughtful statements, in fifteenminutes each, to culture. Dean also reminds us that children are
a Iwould like, as I am sure
rapt overflow audience.
perversely constituted, hence queer-friendlier than
others would, to see the papers expanded and to Edelman admits. Is the reminder a side blow, how
see them garner a volume of responses. I take the ever,because theversion of childhood thatbullies
opportunity of this postconvention print forum to American is not Freudian? Dean's most
queerdom
initiate a few possible responses. challenging idea?that the antisocial thesis is really
Did panelists overidentify the antisocial the a
presocial thesis?cries out for supplementation
sis with Edelman? Doing so perhaps blinkered byDean's Beyond Sexuality, inwhich Dean argues
speculation and produced unintended confirma that the aesthetic realm matches eros, open
queer
tions of his position. Disagreeing with Edelmans ing up
new relational forms.

argument in No Future, Munoz inverts it: queers The scholarship of all the panelists traverses
have nothing but a future (albeit theyhave past the aesthetic realm. That realm, perhaps, is the

poets prophesying Xanadu). The inversion evokes queerest: relational and arelational, stimulating
the nineteenth-century finde siecle idea that gays sociability and political ideas yet largely indiffer
have a vocation to redeem their erotic pleasures ent to them. In the name of aesthetics, I
realizing
for everyone's future benefit. Heroic queer respon most have quarreled with Halberstam's in
might
to democratic, and anti tention to discredit Bersani and Edelman's
sibility anticapitalist, "nega
imperialist progress informs thepages of Edward tivity" on the grounds of the "excessively small
Carpenter, J.A. Symonds,Oscar Wilde, Frederick archive" they appeal to?those elite white boys
Rolfe, and Ronald Firbank. The literary-political Gide and Proust. Halberstam thinks that Jamaica
fantasies of those figures engendered thepersonae Kincaid, Valerie Solanas, and Finding Nemo con
of Roger Casement and T. E. Lawrence. In fiction stitute the rightly broad archive that vouches for
and in fact, at the head of the previous century, queer eros's political and social efficacy. I think
one finds an array of citizen queens. But must Halberstam's archive is only a demotic counter
why
a gay beast of burden perennially undertake the snobbery for the snobbery she opposes. If, how
work of anticipatory progress? That is Edelman's ever, one takes her advice to extend the archive,
forceful and protest; and Munoz does what will become clear is that homosexual eros is
question
not Edelmans force. not more arelational than its alternative. The era of
fully escape
The power of Edelman's and company includes an
perspective partly Carpenter unparalleled
derives from itsbearing on a cult of family in the assault on heterosexual institutions?on marriage
United States that never questions the value of and children and their insurance of futures?by
biological reproduction and of children's sensibili heterosexuals. Most literarywriting from 1890
ties. To harp
on children means to harp on par 1945 does not hold a brief for defenses against
enthood; both emphases leave nonreproductive time and death. An influentialpopular archive of
eros in the lurch.Apparently, what reallymatters fictions thus suggests
an undeclared
straight-gay
is, as Edelman has written, "a reality guaran alliance, founded in agreement about the inapti

teed, not threatened by time, [but] sustained by tude of all eros for sociality. The alliance, however
the certainty" of immortality. No Future rewrites has undermined conventional
unacknowledged,
Freud's The Future of
an Illusion-. American
family models of politics, and itperhaps can locate itself
and children, and the nation, have become substi only in thekind of thought thatcharacterizeswhat

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 121.3 Forum: Conference Debates 821

the philosopher Todd May calls poststructuralist Neither liberal inclusionism,with itsultimate faith
anarchism. this alliance, I mean to in rational nor the redemptive
By invoking comprehension,
suggest that what is at stake in the antisocial thesis
hope of producing brave new social collectivities
in queer is of interest not only to homos. can escape the insistence of the antisocial in social
theory
If Freud observes of struc
organization. psychic
Robert L Caserio
tures that anxiety strikes only what's organized,
Pennsylvania StateUniversity,University Park we must note as well that on
organization depends
internal on the self-constituting ten
antagonism,
Works Cited sion of negativity that formsof liberalutopianism,
Leo. Homos. Harvard 1995. oblivious to their own ways of reproduc
Bersani, Cambridge: UP, particular

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and theDeath ing reproductivefuturism,fittinglylocate nowhere.
Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Thus, proponents of liberal utopianism fail to rec
what Adorno so well:
ognize put "Society stays
alive, not its antagonism, but by means of
despite
Antagonism, Negativity, and the Subject it" (320). Happy to earn their applause, instead,
ofQueer Theory by putting the puppet of humanism through its
Last December's MLA on the "antisocial the passion play once again, they lead it in a hymn to
panel
the Futurch evenwhile dressed in heretical drag.
sis in queer theory" featured heated debate about
the logic of (hetero)sexual ideology as it shapes our Delightfully drugged by theharmony, the freedom
from harm, that their harmonies promise, in
of politics, they
pervasive understandings temporality,
as
duce us all to nod along, persuaded thatwe, like
and social relations.1 points of reference
Taking
their puppet, on which most humanities teach
Leo Bersani's foundational of sexuality's
analysis
shall also overcome, for
inherent antipastoralism (see The Freudian Body ing depends, eventually
knowledge, understanding, and progress must, in
and Homos) and my own, more recent contribution
the fullness of time, set us free.
to thefield,No Future: Queer Theoryand theDeath
this panel advocates of po JudithHalberstam, to her credit,won't buy
Drive, brought together
it. in arms, she me in respond
litical negativity (JudithHalberstam and me) and Colleague joins
a to self-resistance, to its
those promoting ing sociality's structurally
practice they defined, instead,
as queer determinative violence, and so to the
utopianism (Jose Munoz and Tim Dean). inescapable
More than a dust-up in the academic enclave allot antagonism that no utopianism transcends. In her

ted to queer theory,this discussion cut to thevery paper for our MLA panel, as indeed throughout
core of our relation to politics, her career, the polemical energy of Halberstam's
profession's history,
and thehumanistic subject.Though never explicitly work refuses the norms that perpetuate the "com

framed as such, one subtended the debate: fort zone" of dominant cultural forces. Instead,
question
do our narratives of political historicist she affirms an angry, uncivil of negativ
efficacy, "politics
and pedagogical naturalize what ity"?a politics in which what troubles me isn't its
analysis, practice
No Future as negativity but its affirmation.
designates "reproductive futurism,"
thus compelling us all, of political affili Take, for example, her invective against what
regardless
ation or critical method, she asserts is the
to prostrate ourselves at sweepingly "gay male" archive's

the altar ofwhat I propose to call the Futurch? "neat, clever, chiasmic, punning emphasis
on

Since limitations rehears style." Putting aside the considerable on

spatial preclude my emphasis

ing and responding to each of the papers, I'll dis style that informsher own writing, putting aside
pense with the queer at once to attend, the conservative, that tends to
Utopians homophobic agenda
instead, to the issue I takewith my compatriot in lurkbehind most modern denigrations of "style,"
negativity?that I take, more
precisely, with Judith putting aside the reductive identitarianism of
Halberstam's account of negativity. To dispense a coherent we
positing single, "gay male archive,"
with the queer Utopians, though, is not to dismiss
might ask what policing stylehas to do with the
their position but to that I've al of Or rather, and here's the
simply suggest "politics negativity."
ready addressed thatposition inNo Future itself. important point: isn't such a
policing of style, even

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822 Forum: Conference Debates PMLA

when aimed at too-comfortable, nor time to come, much as is able to sustain

destroying capitalism
mative social practices, the sort of reactive trans itself only by finding and exploiting new mar
gression, permit
me to call it
anarcho-oedipality,
kets. As the figure of nonproductivity, then, and
that pays those reassuring norms the flattering of the system's ironic incoherence, the queer both
tributeof imitation?Doesn't it suppose, after all, threatens and consolidates the universal empire
itsown reassuringly regulated order inwhich one of the Futurch. But what threatens itmost is queer
can
always know in advance what a
given style negativity's refusal of positive identity through a
means or allows? Doesn't it on a faith in the drivelike resistance to the violence, the originary
rely
fixed self-identityof things, on their legible co violation, effected, as Adorno writes, by "the all
herence, unmarked by the rupturing
excess of subjugating identityprinciple" (320). In opposing
what we see as a queer remainder? Doesn't that principle, internalized as the of repro
might engine
it assume that styles like "boredom, ductive futurism, queer negativity opposes the
indifference,
ironicdistancing" admit of some positive distinc of humanistic as well. It urges us
subject teaching
tion from others, like rudeness, to imagine a pedagogy not linked to thedominant
sincerity, spite?
Could a reader of No for example, "serviceof goods" (Lacan 303), a pedagogy inflected
Future,
thinkHalberstam wholly unironic in adducing by thequeer remainder that everygood denies.
my book as an instance of the "gay male archive"'s Approaching the humanities without any
small of affect?a she pretends to
need to preserve the subject of humanism: this
range range
believe makes no room for intensity, overinvest
definesmy currentproject,which I'm calling Bad
Education, as well as the
ment, or But we can't, of course, impulse characterizing
anger?2 actually
Halberstam's work at its best. how
know if she's being ironic here or not. The limit By confusing,
ever, the abiding that accounts for po
point of knowledge: that's the locus of negativ
negativity

as a
litical antagonism with the simpler act of negating
ity. Affirming, however, positive good, "punk
Halberstam seems
positions,
pugilism" and itsgestural repertoire,Halberstam
particular political
tomisrecognize her own most effectivepolitical
strikes thepose of negativitywhile evacuating its
claims. She translates,much like the Sex Pistols,
force. I focus on her explicit embrace of punk to
the radical of "No Future" into noth
challenge
distinguish the point Imake inNo Future from more than a reformist to
ing reproach authority:
the "antisocial" politics she locates in the Sex Pis
"No futurefor you." Such a path leads us back to
tols' anthem "God Save theQueen." Though origi
the Futurch, where spurious apostles of negativ
called "No Future," "God Save the Queen"
nally
does in fact, dissent from reproductive futur
ityhammer new idols out of theirgood, while the
not,
aim of queer negativity is rather to hammer them
ism. It conventionally calls for England to awake
into the dust. In the process, itmust not
though,
from the "dream" that allows for "no future" while
make the swing of thehammer an end in itselfbut
implying that the disenfranchised, those "flowers face up to political antagonism with thenegativity
in the dustbin" forwhom the song speaks, hold
of critical Dare we trace, then, the un
thought.
the seeds of potential renewal. "We're the future,"
to no no
traversable path that leads good and has
it tells us, against its refrain, "No future for you."
other end than an end to the good as such? If so,
Ironically, given Halberstam's dismissal of style, our chiasmic inversions may well guide
us better
itspunk negativity thus succeeds on the level of than "God Save the Queen."
style alone. Taken as political statement, it's little
more than Oedipal kitsch. For violence, shock, as Lee Edelman
or radical in TuftsUniversity
sassination, and rage aren't negative
themselves; most often the funda
they perform
mentalist faith that always inspirits the Futurch: Notes
the affirmative attachment to "sense, mastery, and
1. This essay attempts to respond to the debate en
in Halberstam's words.
meaning," not attempt to summarize
gaged at theMLA panel. It does
No Future, by contrast, approaches negativity the paper I presented. That paper is forthcoming in a spe
as which sustains
society's constitutive antagonism, cial issue of SAQ titled After Sex? On Writing since Queer
itselfonly on thepromise of resolution in futurity's Theory, edited by Janey Halley and Andrew Parker.

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 i2i.3 1 Forum:ConferenceDebates 823

2. In her MLA presentation, for instance, Halberstam lation to a well-defined canon of gaymale aesthetic
read with great gusto this much-quoted sentence from and has also
production by Genet, Proust, others,
chapter 1: "Queers must respond to the violent force of been useful for the theorization of femme recep
such constant provocations not only by insisting on our
tivities (Cvetkovich) and butch abjection and les
not only by
equal right to the social order's prerogatives,
bian loneliness (Love).And thepolitics of Bersani's
avowing our capacity to promote that order's coherence
to the extent that one can a
and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and project, identify politi
the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order forwhich cal trajectoryin a radically nonteleological project,
they stand hear anyway in each and every expression
or resides in its brutal rejection of the comforting
manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order that we use to cushion our fall into mor
platitudes
and the Child in whose name we're collectively terror
and nonmastery.
tality, incoherence,
ized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the

poor, innocent kid on theNet; fuck Laws with both capi

My own recentwork isprofoundly influenced
tal Is and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic by this particular strand of queer theory,and in
relations and the future that serves as its prop" (29). Dude, Where's My Theory?, a new book on "the
politics of knowledge in an age of stupidity,"I try
to on counterintuitive and patently
Works Cited capitalize queer
forms of negative In chapters on
knowing. stupid
Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ash
ton. New York: Continuum, 1994. ity,forgetting,failure, and inauthenticity,I tryto
Lee. No Future: the Death expose the logic of the binary formulation that
Edelman, Queer Theory and
damns certain modes of knowing to the realms of
Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
absence, and passivity and elevates oth
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: negation,
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. Ed. Jacques ers to the status of common sense. But on the
panel
Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Nor at the 2005MLA convention, Iwanted toproduce a
ton, 1992. conversation about Lee Edelman's book No Future,
Sex Pistols. "God Save the Queen." Virgin, 1977. in my makes the most
which, opinion, perhaps
and controversial recent contribution
powerful
to antisocial queer Edelman's de
theory. polemic
The Politics ofNegativity inRecent as the
scribes the rejection of futurity meaning of
Queer Theory queer critique and links queer theory to thedeath
in order to propose a relentless form of nega
The panel "TheAntisocial Thesis inQueer Theory," drive

at the 2005 MLA convention, was intended to ex tivity in place of the forward-looking, reproductive,

plore recentwork in queer theory influenced by

and heteronormative politics of hope that animates

Leo Bersani's definition of sex as anticommunitar all toomany political projects. The queer subject,
ian, self-shattering, and anti-identitarian. Bersani's he argues, has been bound epistemologically to
book Homos a counterintuitive but cru to nonsense, to to unin
proposed negativity, antiproduction,
cial shiftin thinkingaway fromprojects of redemp and?instead of fightingthischaracter
telligibility,
tion, reconstruction, restoration, and reclamation ization queerness into recognition?he
by dragging
and toward what can an antisocial, that we embrace the negativity that we, as
only be called proposes
Edelman's
negative, and antirelational theory of sexuality. The queer subjects, structurally represent.
sexual instinct, then, in this formulation, nestles about ascribes to queerness the
polemic futurity

up against the death drive and constitutes a force function of the limit; while the heteronormative

opposing what Bersani terms "the tyranny of the political imagination propels itselfforward in time
self." Rather than a life force that connects pleasure
and space through the indisputablypositive image
to life, survival, and futurity, sex, and particularly of the child, and while itprojects itselfback on the
homo-sex and receptive sex, is a death drive that past through thedignified image of theparent, the
undoes the self, releases the self from the drive for queer subject stands between heterosexual opti

mastery, coherence, and resolution; "the value of mism and its realization. At thispoliticalmoment,
itself," writes Bersani, "is to demean the Edelman's book constitutes a
sexuality compelling argument
seriousness of efforts to redeem it" ("Rectum" 222). against a United States imperialistproject of hope
Bersani's work, while it
clearly situates itself in re and one of the most statements of queer
powerful

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824 Forum: Conference Debates PMLA

studies' contribution to an
anti-imperialist, queer nas, JamaicaKincaid, Patricia Highsmith,Wallace
counterhegemonic imaginary, yet I tried to engage and Gromit, Johnny Rotten, Nicole Eiseman, Ei

critically with Edelman's project in order to argue leen Myles, June Jordan, Linda Besemer, Hothead
fora more explicitlypolitical framing of the anti Paisan, Finding Nemo, Lesbians on
Ecstasy, Debo
social project. rah Cass, SpongeBob, Shulamith Firestone,Marga
While other critics may well oppose Edel Gomez, Toni Morrison, and Patti Smith.
man's book for what see as an antichild The gay male archive?because it is limited
they
stance, this was not and is not my with to a short list of favored canonical writers?is also
problem
the book. For me the book is limited by its own bound by
a
particular range of affective responses.
narrow vision of an archive of negativity. Edelman And so ennui, boredom, indifference,
fatigue,
frameshis polemic against futurity
with epigraphs ironic
distancing, indirectness, arch dismissal,

by JacquesLacan and Virginia Woolf, but he omits insincerity, and camp make up what Ann Cvet

the more obvious reference that his title conjures kovich has called "an archive of feelings" asso

up, one that echoes recent queer antisocial ciated with this form of antisocial theory. This
through
aesthetic Save the Queen" as canon occludes another suite of affectivities asso
production?"God
sung by the Sex Pistols.While the Sex Pistols used ciated, again, with another kind of politics and a
the refrain "no future" to a formulaic union different form of negativity. In this other archive,
reject
of nation, and Edelman tends we can for example, rudeness, an
monarchy, fantasy, identify, rage,
to cast material
political
concerns as crude and ger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania, sincerity,
as a earnestness, overinvestment, and bru
pedestrian, already part of the conjuring of incivility,
tal honesty. The first archive is a camp
futuritythathis projectmust foreclose. archive,

At theMLA special session, I proposed two a repertoire of formalized and often formulaic

very differentexamples of antisocial theoristswho responses to the banality of straight culture and
articulate thepolitics of an explicitlypolitical nega the repetitiveness and of het
unimaginativeness
I don't The second archive, however, is
tivity: Valerie Solanas and Jamaica Kincaid. eronormativity.

have space here to detail precisely the form that farmore in keeping with the undisciplined kinds
of responses that Bersani at least seems to associ
their negativity takes, but Jamaica Kincaid's nov
ate with sex and and it is here that
els oppose theoptimism of the colonial vision with queer culture,

a ferocious the promise of loss of mastery

voice of despair, refusal, and self-shattering,
negation,
and meaning, and desire is
bleak and Valerie Solanas articulates a unregulated speech,
pessimism,
unloosed. anger, anticolonial ra
antisocial that casts patriarchy as Dyke despair,
deeply politics
cial rage, counterhegemonic violence, punk pu
not a form of male domination but also the for
just
are the bleak and angry territories
mal of sense, mastery, and meaning. gilism?these
production
of the antisocial turn; these are the jagged zones
The real problem, to my mind, with this anti
inwhich not only self-shattering (the opposite of
social turn in queer theoryhas less to do with the
narcissism, in a but other-shattering occurs.
of negativity?which, as I am way)
meaning arguing,
If we want to make the antisocial turn in queer
can be found in an array of from
political projects,
we must be willing to turn away from the
anticolonialism to more to do with theory,
punk?and
comfort zone of polite to embrace a
the excessively small archive that represents exchange
queer
The gay male archive coincides with the trulypolitical negativity, one that promises, this
negativity.
time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to
canonical archive and narrows it down to a select
be loud, unruly, to breed resentment, to
of antisocial aesthetes and icons impolite,
group queer camp
to to assas
and texts. It includes, in no particular
bash back, speak up and out, disrupt,
then, order,
sinate, shock, and annihilate, and to abandon the
Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, BetteMidler,
neat, clever, chiasmic, on
punning emphasis style
AndyWarhol, Henry James,JeanGenet, Broadway and stylisticorder that characterizes both the gay
musicals, Marcel Proust, Alfred Hitchcock, Oscar
male archive and the theoretical about it.
writing
Wilde, Jack Smith, JudyGarland, and Kiki and
Herb, but it rarely mentions all kinds of other anti JudithHalberstam
social writers, artists, and texts, like Valerie Sola University of Southern California

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 i2i.3 Forum: Conference Debates 825

Works Cited relationality first and foremost distances queerness

from what some theorists seem to think of as contam
Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. or other particularities
ination by race, gender, that
-. "Is the Rectum a Grave?" AIDS: Cultural Analysis I
taint the purity of sexuality as a trope of
Cultural Activism. Ed. Douglas singular
Crimp. Cambridge:
1988. 197-222. difference. In other words, I have been of the opinion
MITP,
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive ofFeelings: Trauma, Sexuality, that antirelational to queer were
approaches theory
and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. wishful thinking, investmentsindeferringvarious
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death dreams of difference. It has been clear tomany of us,
Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. for quite a while that the antirelational in queer
now,
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of studies was the gay white man's last stand.1
Queer History. Cambridge: Harvard UP, forthcoming.
I have chosen to counter that argue
polemics
for antirelationality by insisting on the essential
need for an understanding of queerness as collec
Thinking beyond Antirelationality and
in recent
tivity. At the 2005 MLA
Antiutopianism inQueer Critique panel, essays,
and inmy forthcoming book Cruising Utopia, I
down Utopia is an easy move. It is per to the assertion is no future
Shouting respond that there for
even easier than or
haps smearing psychoanalytic the queer by arguing that queerness is primarily
deconstructive practices with the charge on the hori
reading about Queerness is always
futurity.
of nihilism. The antiutopian critic of today has a zon. for queerness to have any value what
Indeed,
well-worn war chest of poststructuralist at
pieties soever, itmust be considered visible on the
only
her or his disposal to shut down lines of thought
horizon. argument is therefore interested in
My
that inhabit the concept of Utopia. Social theory
critiquing the ontological certitude that I under
that invokes the concept of Utopia has always been
stand to accompany the politics of presentist and
vulnerable to of naivete, or
charges impracticality, This certi
pragmatic contemporary gay identity.
lack of rigor.At theMLA panel "The Antisocial
tude is often a narration of
represented through
Thesis in Queer one re
Theory," copanelists
ofmy to
disappearance and negativity that boils down
to my argument for replacing a
sponded faltering
another game of fort-da.
antirelational mode of queer a queer
theory with
My conference paper and the forthcoming
utopianism thathighlighted a renewed investment
book it is culled from have foundmuch propul
in social theory (one that called on not only rela
sion in thework of Ernst Bloch and otherMarxist
tionalitybut also futurity)by exclaiming that there
thinkerswho did not dismiss Utopia. Bloch found
was new or radical some
nothing Utopia. To
about
strident grounds for a critique of a totalizing and
this is of course true insofar as I am
degree calling
on a well-established traditionof critical idealism. naturalizing idea of the present in his concept of
the no-longer-conscious. A turn to the no-longer
I am also not interested in a notion of the radical
conscious enabled a critical hermeneutics attuned
that merely connotes or
extremity, righteousness,
to the not yet here. This
affirmation of newness. My investment in Utopia comprehending temporal

ismy to queer a calculus deployed the past and the future as arma
response thinking that embraces
ments to combat the devastating
politics of the here and now underlined bywhat I logic of the here
consider to be and now, inwhich exists outside the current
today's
hamstrung, pragmatic gay nothing
moment and which naturalizes cultural
agenda. Some would
call this crypto-pragmatic logics like
Iwould not. and heteronormativity.
approach tarrying with the negative. capitalism Concomitantly,
Leo Bersani's which first theorized Bloch has also sharpened our critical
Homos, imagination's

antirelationality, inspired antisocial

queer theories. emphasis on what he famouslycalled "a principle of
Some of us came to is an easy target for antiutopians. But
bury antirelational queer theo hope." Hope
ries at the 2005 on the antisocial while understand themselves
special session the antiutopians might
sis. I have longbelieved that the antirelational turn as critical in the rejection of hope, theywould, in
in queer studies was primarily
a reaction to critical the rush to denounce it,miss the point that hope

approaches that argued for the relational and contin is spawned of a critical investment in Utopia that is

gent nature of sexuality. Escaping

or
denouncing nothing like naive but, instead, profoundly resistant

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826 Forum: Conference Debates PMLA

to the stultifyingtemporal logic of a broken-down failures of imagination in queer critique that I un

present. turn to Bloch, and chal derstand as and

My hope, Utopia antirelationality antiutopianism.
lenges theoretical insightsthathave been stuntedby
the lull of presentness and by various romances of
Jose Esteban Muhoz
New York University
negativityand thathave thusbecome routineand re
soundinglyanticritical.This antiutopian theoretical
falteringiswhat I referredto earlier,almost in jest, Note
as poststructuralistpieties. I have learnedquite a bit
1.1 do not mean all gay white men in queer studies.
from critical described as post More I am
practices commonly precisely, referring to gay white male scholars
structuralist and have no wish to denounce them. who imagine sexuality as a discrete category that can be
The corrective I want to make to abstracted and isolated from other antagonisms in the
by turning Utopia
isattuned toEve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critiqueof the social, which include race and gender.

way inwhich paranoid reading practices have be

come so
nearly automatic in queer studies that they Work Cited
have, in many ways, ceased to be critical. In queer
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle ofHope. Trans. Neville Plaice,
studies, more often than not inter
antiutopianism, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. 3 vols. Cambridge:
twinedwith antirelationality,has ledmany scholars MIT P, 1996.
to an impasse wherein cannot see for Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Peda
they futurity
the lifeof them.Utopian readings are aligned with gogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

what Sedgwickwould call reparativehermeneutics.

The queer utopianism I am for is a
arguing
kind of anti-antiutopianism, to borrow a The Antisocial Homosexual
phrase
from Fredric Jameson. Anti-antiutopianism is not knows that homosexuals throw fabulous
Everyone
about a affirmative or investment Far from we are in fact adept
merely positive parties. antisocial,
in Utopia. and lesbian studies can too eas at practicing sociability in itsmyriad forms.The
Gay

ily snap into the basically reactionary posture of burden of "the antisocial thesis in queer
theory,"
denouncing a critical imagination that does not which Leo Bersani formulatedmost decisively in
short-sightedly deny anything but the here and Homos, is not that lesbians and gay men are un
now. The project of thinking beyond themoment sociable but that some aspect of homosexuality
and against statichistoricisms resonates with Ju threatens the social and that itmight be strategic
dith Halberstam's work on queer to exploit that threat. Homosexuality
temporality's politically
relation to Carla Freccero's notion of can be viewed as because, insofar as
spatiality, threatening
fantasmatic historiography, Elizabeth Freeman's we fail to the in a
reproduce family recognizable
theory of temporal drag, Carolyn Dinshaw's ap form, queers fail to reproduce the social.
to the and Jill Dolan's re In this respect, the antisocial thesis
proach "touching past," originates
cent book on I would also not in queer in right-wing
Utopian performance. theory but fantasies about

align itwith Lisa Duggan's critique of neoliberal how "the homosexual agenda" undermines the so

homonormativity. Along those lines,while this cial fabric. Certain queer theorists have suggested
writing project does not always explicitly concern that rather than critique such
reactionary fantasies

race, it shares many with a vi and distance ourselves from them, we might ex
political urgencies
brant list of scholars on the embrace them, take them on. In "Is the
working particulari pediently
ties of queers of color and theirpolitics. Many of Rectum a Grave?," his precursor to Homos, Bersani

these authors fillout the table of contents for the contended that "it is perhaps necessary to accept the

special issue of Social Text,What's Queer about pain of embracing, at least

provisionally,
a homo

Queer Studies Now?, that I recently coedited with phobic representation of homosexuality" (209).

JudithHalberstam and David Eng. Ultimately, This line of thinking has been pursued
my theoryof queer futurityattends to the past for by Lee Edelman in his recent book No Future,
the purpose of critiquing a present. This project which focused much of theMLA panel's debate
depends on critical practices that stave off the and disagreement. Instead of arguing against

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 121.3 Forum: Conference Debates 827

the viciously homophobic representation of ho I pointed toMichael Snediker's importantwork on

mosexuality
as sterile, unproductive, antifam queer optimism as anotherway of thinking about
ily, and death-driven, Edelman insists that "we futuritybeyond recentqueer theoretical emphases
should listen to, and even perhaps be instructed on negativity,melancholia, and thedeath drive.

by, the readings of queer sexualities produced by Reaching beyond Lacanian psychoanalytic
the forces of reaction" (16). If there is a germ of orthodoxy, my paper focused above all on what
truth in homophobic stereotypes of queerness Deleuze calls "becoming"?a ceaseless movement
as destructive, thenwe might heroically identify of being that is not coordinated by teleology and
with those negative stereotypes in order to short that never results in an iden
anything resembling
circuit the social in its present form. tity.The significance of this perspective on futu
Embracing the homophobic alignment of rity stems from the fact that the antisocial thesis
queerness with thedeath drive, Edelman wants to properlybegins with neither Edelman nor Bersani
harness the drive's negativity to his assault on "re but ratherwith Guy Hocquenghem?specifically,
productive futurism."By reproductivefuturism he with his Deleuzian reading of Freud inHomosex
means the dominant ideology of the social, which ual Desire (1972).Hocquenghem sheds lighton the
sees it in terms of a future requiring
not
only
re antisocial thesis by explaining, "Homosexual de
production but also protection and that therefore sire is neither on the side of death nor on the side
represents futurity in the image of the innocent of life; it is the killer of civilized egos" (150). Ho
child.Yet Freud's theoryof infantilesexuality,with mosexual desire achieves that effect by shattering
its account of an original predisposition
to
poly the imaginary identities throughwhich we recog
morphous perversion, long ago shattered the illu nize ourselves and others.What I findcrucial here
sion of childhood innocence. We cannot protect is that the shatteringof the civilized ego betokens
kids from perverts, because we cannot
effectively
not the end of sociality but rather its inception.
insulate any child fromhim- or herself.As Freud This point has been missed bymany of Ber
discovered, sexual comes sani's readers too. The movement of coming to
repeatedly perversion
from inside the familyhome, not fromoutside it. gether only to be plunged into an experience of
However, once the social is defined in terms the nonrelational represents but the first step in
of a future represented by the child, then queer Bersani's account of
relationality. The second, cor
ness (or perverse, nec relative is to trace new forms of new
nonreproductive sexuality) step sociability,
essarily negates that future by fissuring it from ways of being together, that are not grounded in
within?just as, in Lacanian terms, the real frac imaginary identityor the struggle for intersubjec
tures the symbolic fromwithin. According to this tive recognition. In my view, ego identity
disrupting
argument, queerness is antisocial, not access to the
structurally through "self-shattering" gives produc
so. the sociopolitical
empirically By construing tivity of the primary process, which is profoundly
order in and terms, connective. and
primarily imaginary symbolic Hocquenghem, following Deleuze
while the queer as real to Guattari, of bodies in," whereas
simultaneously invoking speaks "plugging
undermine that order, Edelman's account offers we
today might speak of "hooking up"?a visceral
too monochromatic a vision of the symbolic; it fur dramatization of the promiscuous of un
sociability
nishes too narrow a of the social; and it conscious desire when unconstrained
conception by Oedipus.
paints an
unimaginative picture of the future. The symbolic law of reproductive futurism is
My colleagues on theMLA panel elaborated not as
encompassing
or determinative as Lacani
similar criticismsofEdelman's project. Highlight ans likeEdelman seem to think.The
theoryof the
ing thepredictabilityof his archive, JudithHalber unconscious is a story about the underdetermina
stam anatomized a more messier vision tion, as well as the overdetermination, of subjectiv
expansive,
of the social that embraces without fore ismore sociable, more
negativity ity.Nothing promiscuously
closing futurity.In his fascinatingdiscussion of the intenton hooking up, than thatpart of our being
New York School poets, JoseMunoz outlined vari separate from selfhood.My paper concluded by ar
ous possibilities of queer
futurityin termsof Uto guing thatqueer theoryand politics need a vigor
pia and potentiality.During thediscussion period, ously argued antisocial thesis, inorder tograsp how

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828 Forum:ConferenceDebates PMLA
|

-. a Grave?" AIDS:
beyond the normative coordinates of selfhood lies
"Is the Rectum Cultural Analysis I
Cultural Activism.Ed. Douglas Crimp.
an orgy of connection that no regime
can
regulate.
Cambridge:
MIT P, 1988. 197-222.
Tim Dean Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death

University at Buffalo Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.

Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. Trans. Daniella

Dangoor. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Works Cited U of
Snediker, Michael. Queer Optimism. Minneapolis:
Bersani, Leo. Homos. Harvard UP, 1995. Minnesota P, forthcoming.
Cambridge:

AreWe Postcolonial?Post-SovietSpace
Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of
Slavic and East European Languages
29 December 2005, Washington, DC

or
Are You Postcolonial? To the Teachers of beginnings inmonopoly capitalist mercantile
colonialisms and transform itself in the process.
Slavic and Eastern European Literatures
Every postcoloniality is situated, and therefore
You have involved yourselves in the rethinking of different.A Critique ofPostcolonial Reason was
Soviet studies as not only post-Soviet studies but
provoked by Kant's use of thewestern Australian
studies. The first wave of post
Aborigine. How will this travel to the "European"
also postcolonial
colonial studies was based on the British empire.
imagination of "the Other Europe" today? How
We have a lot to learn as thatmodel travels out of will you displace our modern notions of hybrid
its firstcontained sphere into the aftermathof old when think of the restlessness of,
diasporas you
multicultural Does lead Armenia?
empires. postcolonialism say,
to nationalism? Is postcolonialism appropriated In response to students in the Slavic depart
the metropolitan Is "scientific so ment at Columbia I wrote as follows:
by diaspora? University,
cialism" to "civilizing mission"? Is the
comparable
"Other Europe" movement?in Poland, Hungary, When an alien nation-state establishes it

Bohemia, the Balkans, and elsewhere?manage self as ruler, its own laws and sys
impressing
able within a specificallypostcolonial framework? tems of education and rearranging the mode
Must the post-Soviet world be thought of as a new of production for its own economic benefit,
Eurasia in order for the postcolonial to "colonizer" and "colonized" can be used. The
viewpoint
stick, as Mark von has suggested? The ar of applying them to a wide ar
Hagen consequences

gument about women as the surrogate proletariat rayof political and geographic entitieswould
in central Asia traveled out of Soviet studies. How be dire if colonialism had only one model.
will thatfigure? On the other hand, ifwe notice how different
This rethinking implies that themost eman kinds of adventures and projects turn into
not something that fits the bare-bones descrip
cipatory vision of the Enlightenment could
withstand theweight of the objective and subjec tion given above, we will have a
powerful
of
tive history of older, precapitalist empires. Our analysis of the politics of progressivism,
current and so-called programs do one sort or another. How do political philos
emancipatory
not with this. There be some use, of social relate to the overdeter
engage might ophies justice

then, in rethinking postcolonialism for this new minations of practical politics? This venerable
task. But itmust unmoor itself from its provisional receives interesting
answers ifwe
question

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