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ABSTRACT
Through a comparative reading of work by Georges Bataille, Lee Edelman, Guy Hocquenghem and Pseudo-Dionysius, this essay argues that they share an apophatic vision that informs a politics of negating refusal. It insists that a queer theology, and its accompanying political vision, must be critical without reserve, and only then can it avoid the antagonisms that comprise the social order.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Kent L. Brintnall is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte affiliated with the Department of Religious Studies and the Women’s & Gender Studies Program. He is the author of Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure (Chicago, 2011) and the co-editor of Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion (Fordham, 2015) and Sexual Disorientations: Queer Affects, Temporalities, Theologies (Fordham, forthcoming).
Notes
1 Brooks, “The Next Culture War.”
2 Kushner, Angels in America, 52.
3 Ibid., 132–3. Prior continues: “And even if he did … if He ever dared to show his face … , if after all this destruction, if after all the terrible days of this terrible century He returned to see … how much suffering His abandonment created, if He did come back you should sue the bastard. That's my only contribution to all this Theology. Sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He.” Ibid., 133.
4 Ibid., 135.
5 Ibid., 144.
6 Ibid., 148. This concluding scene is not unlike the (post-)wedding scenes that finish most romantic comedies. Although Prior's statement marks this conclusion as a beginning, it is a narrative closure. Just as many commentators have noted, the romantic comedy shows us only how the couple is formed, it never gives us a clue as to what married life looks like or how it can be sustained. Similarly, Angels in America gives no clue as to what this Great Work is or how it is to be accomplished, it offers only a gesture of faith that it is possible because various obstacles have been cleared. The inclusion of more and more people into the realm of citizenship is the faith of the play, but this faith depends on an exclusive logic of overcoming the threats and impediments to that inclusive vision. The offering of forgiveness to Roy Cohn, the play's clear villain, complicates this picture of a necessary exclusion somewhat. But it should be noted that at the conclusion of the scene where Cohn is treated with greatest sympathy, he is called out as a “sonfabitch.” Ibid., 124–6.
7 Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. I, 20–1, 23.
8 Ibid., 23.
9 Although Edelman, following Lacan, distinguishes drive from desire, and connects only the former to queerness, for purposes of this essay, I use these terms interchangeably. Because what Hocquenghem and Pseudo-Dionysius name as desire is conceptually similar to what Edelman calls the drive, I risk the terminological confusion.
10 Bataille, The Accursed Share, volumes II–III, 143; Bataille, Guilty, 46–7. For further discussion of Bataille's conception of the erotic object, see Brintnall, Ecce Homo, 178–85.
11 “In the place of the good, something I want to call ‘better,’ though it promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing.” Edelman, No Future, 5. Bataille's sovereignty, which occupies something approaching the place of the good in his musings, plays a similar critical role that promises only a nothing that will undo all the problematic, alienating somethings that come prior. See Bataille, Accursed Share, II–III, 197–211.
12 Edelman, No Future, 2–3. For elaboration on the similarity of conservative and progressive political visions, see ibid., 6, 14, 27, 60, 151.
13 For precisely this reason, the figure of the Child often inflicts damage on actual flesh-and-blood children. The figural Child's innocence makes any hint of sexual or gender variance from an actual child sufficient justification for surveillance, discipline and rehabilitation. Thus, Tim Dean's rejoinder to Edelman that children are the “original queers” fails to grapple with how the figural Child possesses none of that queerness. See Dean, “The Impossible Embrace, 128. As Sigmund Freud noted when making a case for the importance of children's sexuality, this understanding runs counter to public opinion about actual children's lives; the various panics about children's proximity to sexuality reveal this dynamic still operates. Similarly, Edelman's argument cannot be critiqued by reference to actual children and the ways they are mistreated or undervalued; in fact, his consideration of the figure of the Child provides us with analytical tools to understand why that is the case. The fantasy of what a Child's life experience should be is often used as a reason to monitor and manage actual children – and their caretakers. Exposure to chaotic living circumstances – “evidenced” by any number of behaviors that serve as proxy for racial, ethnic and class biases – justifies various interventions by the state and other institutions. Discordance between the figural Child and actual children's behavior serves to justify treating the latter as adults – or, worse, as completely expendable. For these reasons, José Muñoz's appeal to the life chances of actual children as a critique of the power of the figure of the Child is simply an analytical mistake. His insistence that the future of queer youth of color must be guaranteed fails not only to note the discussion between figure and fact, but more importantly, it fails to grapple with how such a future can be guaranteed without participating in the antagonisms that Edelman describes. Muñoz's disagreements with Edelman are assertions of an alternate faith, not counter-arguments. See Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 91–6.
14 Edelman, No Future, 5.
15 In a recent issue of differences addressing antinormativity in queer theory, Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson document, in persuasive detail, the way in which norms and normativity have become “queer theory's axiomatic foe.” Wiegman and Wilson, “Introduction,” 1–2. Their critique turns on their worry that an oppositional account of norms – like the one summarized and attributed to Edelman above – fails to capture with sufficient historical and analytical nuance the way in which norms function. Despite this worry, they note that Edelman's position is subtler than the oppositional logics they critique. In a footnote, they fault him for slipping into such normative thinking, rather than grappling with his account that formation of the self and the social depend on and are inextricably bound to a structural antagonism. Ibid., 13–14. The stronger response would be that more nuanced historical and social analysis shows that the divisions on which Edelman's argument insists are never quite so sharp and distinct in practice: there is no clear inside and outside, but only murky, perpetually shifting boundaries. But Edelman's argument depends not on empirical reality, but on the fantasies, ideals, images, representations, and ideological narratives to which a society's members ascribe and aspire. To say it another way, the subject's experience of living in late capitalism may be informed by any number of experiences of fracture, disorientation and incoherence, but as long as coherence and stability – even as the plumbline orienting processes of rapid growth and adaptability – remain the brass ring, Edelman's analysis has critical purchase.
Given that I find Edelman's account persuasive – even though I think that the issues raised by Wiegman and Wilson deserve careful consideration as one of the most thoughtful rejoinders to his approach – I find Madhavi Menon's contribution to the differences issue quite intriguing. Thinking about the partition of India and Pakistan, Menon argues that humans share a universal experience of disfiguring particularity that cannot be fully named and known. So, like Edelman, for Menon, human life is typified by a universal, because particularizing, negativity. See Menon, “Universalism and Partition,” 118–40.
16 Edelman, No Future, 7.
17 Ibid., 7–9, 22–3, 37.
18 Ibid., 48; see also ibid., 17 (“congealment”) and 74 (“immobility”).
19 Ibid., 9, 22, 106, 115, 135–6. In the closing pages of No Future, invoking a discussion of Walter Benjamin by Paul de Man, Edelman likens the pulsive force of the drive that he names as queerness to the sacred or divine. Ibid., 152–3. This characterization merits comparison to Bataille's understanding of the sacred. See, for example, Bataille, Theory of Religion, 43–57.
20 Edelman, No Future, 6–7, 17, 30, 141–3.
21 Ibid., 109, 152.
22 Ibid., 4–5, 101.
23 Ibid., 5.
24 See ibid., 26–7, 105–9, 114, 154. Edelman insists that this otherness is a structural position; its inhabitants may be changed, but the position itself remains. In other words, even if queerness lost its historical connection to lesbians and gays or transgender people, even if people of color and immigrants and Muslims were welcomed into the American polis, what Edelman describes and discusses as queerness will attach to some subject or some set of desires. The liberal fantasy of a fully inclusive society is just that – a fantasy. And, as liberal vilification of bigots of various stripes makes clear, this inclusive fantasy depends on and generates its own machinery of exclusion.
25 Ibid., 3.
26 Ibid., 45.
27 Ibid. Such behavior finds support, of course, in the Christian Scriptures. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus explains that those people who fail to feed the hungry, to welcome the stranger and to comfort the sick will be punished in “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Matthew 25:41–6.
28 Edelman, No Future, 45.
29 Edelman concludes his discussion of religiously justified compassion toward homosexuals that demands telling them the truth about their sinfulness, need for redemption, and capacity for change by noting, “That compassion can look like callousness … and callousness like compassion … suggests that compassion and callousness differ only by decree.” Ibid., 90.
30 Edelman, “Antagonism,” 822; Edelman, “Ever After,” 111–12, 117.
31 With his insistence on a pulsive force that informs both the social order's constraint of queerness, and queerness’ resistance to the social order, Edelman articulates a monism similar to Pseudo-Dionysius’ notion that evil does not exist, but is merely the privation of the Good. See Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, 84–96. In both instances, there is an apparent state of things – an experience of reality as a duality, as a tension between opposing forces – that is a misconception, an illusion, a misunderstanding.
32 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 43. For discussions of this passage, see Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault,” 26–32; Huffer, Mad for Foucault, 67–80; Jordan, Convulsing Bodies, 105–8.
33 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 43–4.
34 Ibid., 44.
35 Ibid. The closing pages of Foucault's History of Sexuality detail how desire to know the truth of our sexuality fuels power's most tantalizing ruse. Ibid., 150–9.
36 Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 51. For discussions of Hocquenghem's biography, political activism and intellectual foundations, see Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem and the introductory essays by Michael Moon and Jeffrey Weeks in the 1993 translation of Homosexual Desire.
37 Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 51.
38 Ibid., 49–50. For precisely this reason, recognizing various alternative forms of desire – or transgressive subjectivities – can never transform restrictive economies of identity into polymorphous perversity. The fulgurations of desire itself must be allowed to move unbounded. See ibid., 139. For a similar analysis of the political possibilities of polymorphous perversity, see Meili, Homosexuality & Liberation. For a discussion of the differences between Hocquenghem and Mieli, see Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem, 36–8.
39 Hocquenghem's discussion of the relation between paranoia and homosexuality develops this idea. Homosexuality is not a product of paranoia, Hocquenghem argues against classical psychoanalytic understandings, rather paranoia is heterosexuality's fear of the homosexual desire it must repress to exist. See Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 55–67.
40 The power of the therapist in the psychoanalytic situation to transform the patient into an object of knowledge is the heart of Lynne Huffer's critique of psychoanalysis. See Huffer, Mad for Foucault, 138–63. Whether any psychoanalyst familiar with and committed to the nature of the drive would think that the patient's psyche could be a knowable object is never considered by Huffer. Her critique of psychoanalysis uniformly refuses to engage the content of psychoanalytic theory.
41 Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 52–3.
42 Ibid., 53. In his earlier work, Homographesis, Edelman examines the ways that homosexuality is made to bear the burden of sexuality's anxiety-provoking unknowability. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet can be understood in similar terms.
43 For broader accounts of Pseudo-Dionysius, see Coakley and Stang, Rethinking Dionysius the Areopagite; Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena; Louth, Denys the Areopagite; Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius; Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite.
44 Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, 49–50 (588B).
45 Ibid., 56 (596C).
46 For another comparative account of desire in Pseudo-Dionysius, see Brintnall, “Transcribing Desire.”
47 Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, 50 (588C–589A).
48 Ibid., 54 (593D).
49 Ibid., 77 (704A–704B). Renaming, reconceptualizing, reimagining the One, the Cause as the Beautiful and the Good renders more plausible Pseudo-Dionysius’ strong claims about desire as the basic, moving force undergirding all creation. Whereas the former names are cold and abstract, the latter are familiar ways of describing objects of desire.
50 Ibid., 79–80 (708B) (emphasis added).
51 This complex notion of internal and external should be thought in relation to psychoanalytic models that blur the boundary of inside and outside with their notions of drive and identification, and in relation to critiques of psychoanalysis, like Lynne Huffer's, that attribute an obsession with internality to psychoanalysis.
52 Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity, 165–7.
53 Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, 82 (712B).
54 Pseudo-Dionysius clarifies that there is a “single yearning which is the father of all yearnings.” Ibid., 83 (713C).
55 Ibid., 82 (712A). Although Pseudo-Dionysius writes that “divine yearning brings ecstasy so that the lover belongs to the self but not to the beloved,” and earlier names God the Beloved, ibid. 82 (712A) and 77 (704A), his understanding of yearning as a movement that impels God – the Beloved – to go beyond and outside itself undoes any conception that one half of this pair remains self-possessed while the other becomes a possession.
56 By insisting on yearning's primacy, I am not suggesting that yearning is an origin or an ontological ground. Rather, I am thinking with French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, who identifies the primal as “that element in the … situation which is inevitable, which is beyond even the most general contingency … . Dealing with the primal means dealing with the universal.” Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, 89. Laplanche's theory of general seduction, which insists that the drive is not an inborn, biological feature of the human, but rather is implanted through the messages and stimulations generated by acts of the infant's caregivers, is another framework for thinking about the Dionysian yearning that comes from beyond God and entices God into relation with creation and creatures. For a general statement of Laplanche's theory, see Laplanche, New Foundations, 89–151. This understanding of sexuality is central to much of Leo Bersani's earliest work. See Bersani, The Forms of Violence; Bersani, The Freudian Body; and Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Recently, Teresa de Lauretis has explored its value for queer theory. See de Lauretis, Freud's Drive, 58–87.
57 Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, 82–3 (712C–712D).
58 Ibid., 81 (709C–709D).
59 Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 137 (1001A).
60 Ibid., 138 (1025A).
61 Ibid., 141 (1048A–1048B); Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 71, 74, and 95.
62 Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 94.
63 Ibid., 114.
64 Ibid. Bersani also argues that when sexuality remains attached to relationality, it participates in power's antagonisms, rather than diffusing them. See Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 25.
65 Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 115. The “non-human” dimensions of desire, contrary to the “anthropomorphic” features sustained by homosexuality, are “fundamentally … ignorant of the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality.” Ibid., 75, 114. These calcified forms “are the precarious outcome of a desire which knows no name.” Ibid., 75. Bersani and Edelman similarly constrast the ego and self to the fulminating pulsions of the drive; they also champion the violent, disruptive force of the drive as politically valuable precisely insofar as it undoes the ego's solidity. See Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 29–30; Edelman, No Future, 108–9.
66 Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 71.
67 Ibid., 150, 147.
68 Edelman, No Future, 108–9.
69 Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 135 (997B, 1000A).
70 Ibid., 141 (1048B).
71 Ibid. Consistent with this string of negations, Pseudo-Dionysius also notes that “the Cause of all … suffers neither disorder nor disturbance and is overwhelmed by no earthly passion … It passes through no change, decay, division, loss, no ebb and flow.” Ibid., 140–1 (1040D). While yearning may possibly be distinguished from some of these terms, given their negative connotations, the capacity of the One to be moved, to be enticed, to be drawn away from itself suggests that some disturbance, change, ebb and flow are indeed possible – in fact, definitive – for the Cause of all. As with his description of the relation between the Beloved and the lover, Pseudo-Dionysius again forgets what he previously concluded about yearning and its relation to the Divine. Bersani and Laplanche trace a similar forgetfulness by Freud regarding characterizations of the drive and its relation to sexuality and the self. See Bersani, The Freudian Body; Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis.
72 In Guilty, a collection of ruminations recorded during World War II, Bataille writes:
Here's something to express forcefully, to keep clearly in mind – that there's no truth when people look at each other as if they’re separate individuals. Truth starts with conversations, shared laughter, friendship, and sex, and it only happens going from one person to another. I hate the thought of a person being connected to isolation … . As I picture it, the world doesn’t resemble a separate or circumscribed being but what goes from one person to another when we laugh or make love … . How little self matters then! (Bataille, Guilty, 44–5)
73 Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 53.
74 Ibid.
75 Edelman, No Future, 17.
76 In his discussion of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Edelman gives significant attention to the character of Leonard, and his act of stepping on the hero's fingertips as the latter clings desperately to the edge of Mount Rushmore. The queer's ethical mission is typified by Leonard's attempt to loosen Roger Thornhill's grip by trampling it underfoot. Edelman, No Future, 82–7.
77 Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 138 (1025B).
78 Ibid., 141 (1040D, 1048A).
79 Edelman, “Antagonism,” 822. Edelman also spends time thinking about the terra cotta figure in Hitchcock's North by Northwest as figuring the emptiness of figuration. Edelman, No Future, 82–3. One has to wonder whether a coherent, stable self is the macguffin par excellence.
80 Edelman, “Antagonism,” 822.
81 Ibid.
82 Bataille explains his entire project as a project to undo project. Bataille, Inner Experience, 22, 46. This shows up as the transgressive spiral of contestation in Foucault's essay on Bataille's work. See Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” 29–52; see also Jordan, Convulsing Bodies, 19–26. For Edelman, the queer is the anti-Prometheus whose work, once “unbound,” is to “unbind[ ] us all.” Edelman, No Future, 108.
83 Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 133.
84 Ibid., 134–5.
85 Ibid., 135.
86 Ibid., 136. Compare with Edelman, No Future, 1–3.
87 Edelman, No Future, 4.
88 One of his most striking is “The Practice of Joy before Death,” published on the eve of World War II in the journal Acéphale. The final section opens, “I MYSELF AM WAR.” Throughout, Bataille imagines himself as both the cause and the target of violence – “both as prey and as a jaw of TIME, which ceaselessly kills and is ceaselessly killed … . Ceaselessly destroying and consuming myself in a great festival of blood.” Bataille, “The Practice of Joy before Death,” 238–9.
89 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 57–9. Understood in this way, war is tied to the restricted economy rather than the general economy. War worries about ends and what has to be done to achieve them. See Bataille, Accursed Share, vol. I, 45–61.
90 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 57.
91 Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 53.
92 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 61.
93 Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” 69–71.
94 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 61.
95 “A truly military society is a venture society, for which war means a development of power, an orderly progression of empire. It is a relatively mild society; it makes a custom of the rational principles of enterprise, whose purpose is given in the future, and it excludes the madness of sacrifice.” Bataille, Accursed Share, vol. I, 54–5.
96 For further development of this idea, see Bataille, Accursed Share, vol. I, 189–90; Bataille, “College of Sociology,” 336–40; Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” 128–9; Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” 159; Bataille, Theory of Religion, 103–4.
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