[-empyre-] Queer Mésentente (Political Disagreement)

[virginia solomon]

I don't think we disagree.  Queer does not have an ontology.  I suppose I
did define a certain critical engagement and project, but so too does Butler
in Bodies that Matter.  This critical project has been called to task, to be
sure, for example in Saba Mahmood's *Politics of Piety*, but that is in the
context of feminism rather than queer .  How that materializes changes, as
she says, as did Brecht (which I bring up because I think how you discuss
queer has much to do with Bloch's engagement with the utopian, which Jose
Munoz takes up in his recent work).

certainly you can fold whomever you like.  But Barthes' interest in Lacanian
psychoanalysis (and psychoanalysis crops up all over the place in A Lover's
Discourse) does not, I don't think, discount the differences between
Lacanian desire and Barthsian love.  Differences that I think are productive

but I'd like to take up one point.  You say that queer is not common.  I
certainly understand what it means in the contexts you present, from
Ranciere.  But to move it from the realm of the typical is not necessarily
to move it from the realm of the common, and I think that precisely this
temporariness is part of the common that is being-in-common-in-difference,
as Nancy figures it.

Enjoying the productivity of our agonism :).

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 6:37 PM, Robert Summers <robtsum at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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>



-- 
Virginia Solomon
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