[-empyre-] Response to Virgina Re: Robert's Response on Queer Mésentente

[Robert Summers]

Virginia,

I certainly do appreciate (greatly so) the books you have been
mentioning: much to be read, indeed.  Thanks.

Now, how can we think *queer* and feminism(s) together more, much more
than it has been in the past (or still is in some circles)?  I think
there were many years (and still today) and many (gay, white male)
theorist who disconnected *queer* and feminism, and I like how Butler
always does *queer* work, theory, thinking through feminism, or
feminism through *queer theory* (like in _Undoing Gender_).  I myself
had to come to terms with this -- thanks to the prodding of Amelia
Jones.

I wish Munoz's book would come out!  I must read it: he does
queer-feminist work, excellently, brilliantly.  But, I am a bit
*concerned* about this move to utopianism, but this my be my own
ignorance of his project, but that is such a loaded term, but I am
reading _Queer Optimism_, which is a rethinking of this movement in
*queer theory* towards absolute negativity: *no future,* *shame,*
etc., but the author does not dismiss these.  _Queer Optimism_ is a
really brilliant and smart book.  Nevertheless I feel caught between
negativity and optimism: unresolved in both directions.  Do you know
what I mean?

I think you are right about Barthes and Lacan; I believe we are in accord.

Would you mind explaining more on Ranciere (what I wrote) and Nancy?

Thank you for your generosity!

As ever, Robert




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 :).