[-empyre-] Queer Mésentente (Political Disagreement)

[Robert Summers]

I do not want to subtract from the conversation Virginia has started,
but I do not think this will, but it may sound *preachy* -- but I'm
jewish, so  it is more Jewish mom (?).  Perhaps, it is merely a
supplement, or one of the *ten* -- of which Virginia mentioned: I
think *queer* is more of a question than an answer; I am interested in
folding philosophers and theorists together, or thinking them beside
each other, so I think you can fold Barthes and Lacan: Barthes was
interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis.  Here is my (current) take on
*queer*:

The politico-theoretical term *queer* is not a self-explanatory,
agreed upon, settled term, idea, enactment, political position, and/or
state of embodiment (see _Regarding Sedgwick_, Barber and Clark 2002).
Indeed, after 20 years of *queer (re-)theorizing* there may never be
an agreement of what *queer* ostensibly means or does, which is part
of the turbulent virtualities and productivities of the term as it is
variously deployed in theory and/as practice. I would proffer that
*queer* is not to be worked on and toward an agreement, a consensus;
rather, how and when queer becomes in its perpetual becoming, and how
*queer* is multiple deployed and enacted should be in a constant state
of mésentente (political disagreement) -- to use a term Jacques
Rancière has theorized in his writings on la politique (the political)
(1999).  To further follow Rancière, just as the political is rare
(_Disagreement_ 1999: 17) -- so too is *queer*: it is not common.
Indeed, queer takes place through a disruption that comes from a
miscount that necessarily disrupts the *common of the community* on
occasion (Rancière 1999: 10-11,18-19). In other words, the political
(or _la politique_) and *queer* is only a temporary condition -- as
well as position and enactment, which must be critically and
constantly re-done and re-deployed, which is precisely what Judith
Butler has argued in her important essay, *Critically Queer* (_Bodies
that Matter_ 1993). Similarly, queer can be understood as an
*antagomism* -- or *agonism* -- to draw on and merge (or fold) queer
with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s theorizations of the
political (la politique) and of radical democracy in their landmark
book Hegemony and Social Strategy (1993).
Now to tie these similar political theories back to *queer politics,*
there is a certain relationality that is part and parcel to *queer.*
This relationality is very often *violent* in its (dis- and
re-)connections. Furthermore, *queer* is in constant flux. In a sense
it is a relationality that fluxuates in subtle and sudden moments and
movements, In the words of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, *Queer is a
continuing moment, movement, motive -- recurrent, eddying, troublant.
The word ‘queer’ itself means across -- it comes from the
Indo-European root –twerkw, which also yields the German quer
(transverse), Latin torquere  (to twist), English athwart*
(_Tendencies_ 1993: xii). Without a doubt, *queer* is a violent and
troubling moment, movement.  Furthermore, to deploy *queer tactics*
(play, camp, etc.) very often means to pick up, and twist and turn,
philosophies and political theories that may not appear *queer,* but
it makes them so -- even if only momentarily, temporarily, and/or
strategically. *Queer(-ing)* is a folding of lines of thought into
various thoughts and enactments, configurations and confrontations.
For example, *queer* can be understood as a DeleuzoGuattarian war
machine, an assemblage, a line of flight, a becoming, a
deterritorialization (_A Thousand Plateaus, 1987); it can also be
understood, as I mention in an earlier post as a virus, a virology, or
even a parasite (Serres, _The Parasite_). Now, to continue the
example, which will link up to Tolentino’s *Stringhead* -- which I
mentioned several days ago -- deterritorialization and becoming-,
which is a (re-/un-)working of space and thinking the subject as
non-fixed, unstable, etc., *queer* is also a temporary yet continuous
assemblage of multifarious ideas and enactments, and it is a line of
flight that opens to other becomings. Thus, *queer* is spatial,
temporal, active, continual, and embodied. Furthermore, *queer* is a
minor-politics, to draw on DeleuzoGuattarian thinking, again, that
smashes the molar-politics of the State apparatus, which is to say any
and all *normative* regimes. This takes place on the level of subjects
swarming to form a temporary coalition of various bodies (1987).
Again, according to Eve Sedgwick, queer hinges “much more radically
and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular performative acts
of self-perception and filiation” (_Tendencies_1993: 9), which is to
say queer is something that the subject does even as it simultaneously
un-does tradition conceptions of the subject as it picks up on certain
philosophies and theories as it glides across the social- and
political-sphere.

I think I have said too much and too little (at the same time).  I
shall go back to my liquid dinner ... and enjoy the others ideas.

As ever, Robert

Robert Summers, PhD/ABD