Offering Theory. John Mowitt
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in being resisted by Theory, effects the event of the encounter where Philosophy and identity fear to tread.
3Jean-Luc Nancy in “The Unsacrificeable” has taken up these matters from a rather different angle, but since he argues strenuously against the relation between sacrifice and what he calls, taking his cue from both Bataille and Heidegger, “an absolute outside,” a relation for which I advocate, some comments are called for. Nancy is concerned here with the violently ecstatic character of this relation and its destructive sublation of the spiritualization of sacrifice (see Nietzsche’s aphorism number 55 in Beyond Good and Evil). I take the point, but much hangs on what is meant by “absolute” in Nancy’s formulation. For my part, if one recognizes in it Foucault’s concept of “break,” that is, the radical historicity (the point at which history is no longer history) of the Kantian “noumena,” then the onto-theological disaster feared by Nancy and fended off by the principle of the “unsacrificable” loses much of its horror. Not its gravity, but its horror. To sacrifice Theory properly is to offer it to the possibility of onto-epistemic transgression. The political history of “absolutism” should reassure us in the regard.
4Although perhaps overstated, what is clear about After Theory is that it is deeply invested in what Agamben calls the “politicization of death.” This does not first and foremost concern the politics of killing (who, e.g., authorized and executed the murder and quartering of Jamal Khashoggi), but rather the sovereign power over the zone of indistinction wherein life and death brush insistently up against one another. From such a perspective one reads Eagleton’s persistent rhetorical appeals to death and blood (the basic binary is “bloodless,” bad; “full blooded,” good) with pricked ears. Even correcting for a certain Lawrencian identification, Eagleton is plainly involved in struggling over the matter of the political meaning of death, proposing both implicitly and explicitly that the bloodless blood of Theory (his figure is that of the “bloodstained coin” (Eagleton 2003, 161)) will be on the hands of those who, in denying the blunt facticity of the body, abandon any means by which to protect themselves from a death unchecked by moral condemnation. Theory will aneurysmalize itself. Like the fundamentalist martyr, the postmodern theorist is, apparently, always already hurling toward the instant but empty paradise of self-immolation. There are moments, alas, when Eagleton appears to want a piece of this action. One might then propose that Theory—perhaps uniquely in its postmodern incarnation—assumes the status of “bare life” in Eagleton’s analysis. Precisely to the extent that it has become bloodless, or is otherwise already dead (“cold-blooded” in Eagleton’s parlance), it cannot be sacrificed. It cannot be sacrificed because it has nothing to give, it has nothing of value to secure its status as a totem. Even if we interpret Eagleton’s argument to say that Theory must be sacrificed to or for politics, what seems clear is that in aspiring to an articulation of sovereign power, that is, the authority to exempt from life that which menaces it, he founds his politics on the very zone of indistinction that distinctly complicates the difference between Theory and politics. Indulge me as I then uncharitably suggest that this dilemma appears to suit Eagleton to, as we say, a T, the very letter whose introduction converts morality into mortality, the very letter tau that in the Semitic alphabets marked the brand, indeed brand x, that rendered an animal, for example taurus, one’s property. T, it so happens, also sounds out the name with which Eagleton signs After Theory, “TE” (Eagleton 2003, 227).
QUEER RESISTANCE: FOUCAULT AND THE UNNAMABLE
A crucial aspect of the thinking of context bears on the when–where–who of that which is to be contextualized. As I have suggested, the “who” of this series, as the index and avatar of identity, has come illegitimately to operate as a metonymy for the whole. It has done so at the expense of Theory, or so I contend. To develop this argument one might pose a rather direct “methodological” question, namely, where is it that Theory takes place, or, when does it happen? While this might appear to submit to a preemptive gesture of contextualization, consider that the bizarreness of the question, particularly as it avoids the standard attributive maneuver—who wrote it?—indicates that there is more here than meets the ear. Matters become even more challenging when we consider that Theory’s uncanny status as the “chronic” implies that wherever and whenever it takes place, it isn’t quite. Instead, however, of sitting stunned before this aporia, let me propose that it is precisely under such circumstances that the attractions of reading assert themselves. This never-quite-happening or always-having-happened quality of Theory calls out for attention. Not an interpretation. Not a production of the sense of Theory’s situation, its identity under these circumstances, but a reading of the potential ensnarled in the chronic condition of Theory. As this clearly implies, reading is more than literacy, or if it is literacy, then literacy is more than the exercise of a narrowly defined linguistic competence. Put differently, and to use an expression whose evocativeness we have grown deaf to, what must reading be if one can “read a or the situation”? Is it a “decoding” as Stuart Hall once famously argued? If so, what is the code of the situation, or the encounter, that is deployed in the act of decoding? To be clear, the drift of such questions derives not from the now compulsory impatience with “language” that one hears everywhere and every time we speak of affect, body, technology, objects, matter and so on, but with the distinctive pressure put on the work of reading Theory when its character as reading is taken seriously.
To draw this out, even in some sense to parade it, I turn to the work of Michel Foucault, not the now canonical statements about madness, reason, the clinic, things, discipline, knowledge, power, sexuality and so on, not even the lectures in which these statements were vulcanized and whose insistent contemporary circulation testifies to our refusal, as with Elvis, to live without him. No, I want to read the event of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1971, the talk titled, “The Order of Discourse.” I want us to ponder in what way we can read Theory as occurring within, while also generating, the dispersed contexts of this event. As the title of this chapter makes clear, “queerness” and Theory will rub each other here and perhaps even in the right way.1
What’s in an acronym or, as some prefer, initialism? As I write we have just marked the 50th-year commemoration of the so-called Stonewall Riots, that is, the uprising that developed in response to vice squad raids that took place at and around the Stonewall Inn in New York City during June of 1969. I trust then I will be forgiven for having the acronym LGBTQ in mind. Initially, the acronym took form as both a protest against inaccurate labeling and the assertion of a certain coalitional consciousness. It included only three letters: LGB. Over the course of the ensuing decades it became alphabetically enhanced assuming its current form, and the matter is in dispute, in the late 1990s. A politics of coalition among communities has gradually given way to a metaphysics of intersectionality, with each letter a “proxy” (Gayatri Spivak might insist) for an identity, so, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans-gendered (as opposed to cis-gendered). The odd letter out is Q. It is the one letter that has consistently denoted two separate things: a community (Queers) and a practice (questioning). At the very least, Q is a proxy for a split identity, and this is part of what makes “queer” into a concept whose power is far from exhausted even if it is stopping more frequently at march oases.
The title of the path-breaking volume, Queering the Pitch, is an expedient way to elaborate the point I am concerned to make here, which is embedded, as it were, in the titular pun (Brett, Wood and Thomas, 1994). Queering a pitch invites immediate comparison with the musical practice of “bending a note,” in effect, with the means by which a “blue” or slurred note is produced. Queering thus becomes a technique, a practice that makes a virtue of tonal intemperance. By the same token, queering the pitch (especially in a musicological context where the study of pitch-class sets has set the standard for a certain type of disciplinary knowledge) means altering, or problematizing, the very concept