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Really Bad Infinities: Queer's Honour and the Pornographic Life

William Haver Online Publication Date: 01 October 1999 To cite this Article: Haver, William (1999) 'Really Bad Infinities: Queer's Honour and the Pornographic Life', Parallax, 5:4, 9 21 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/135346499249371 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/135346499249371

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Really Bad In nities: Queers Honour and the Pornographic Life

William Haver

In Body Fluids, an essay as remarkable for its prescience as for its rigour, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille ask in the context of what we have come to know as safer sex discourse in the AIDS pandemic: What will we say to those who ignore advice and continue to make contacts known to be at risk? Will we treat them as irresponsible, to be lectured to, put under observation, and converted? In that case, our future scenario is assured: that of the child in the glass bubble, for whom the outside environment means death; that of the obsessional struggle against all unmonitored contact as potentially the source of death.1 Much has happened in the fourteen years since Stengerss and Gilles essay rst appeared. We have learned, for example, that the pandemic is interminable, that we are, and will be, in what we call our being, of AIDS (with the full force of the partitive: we belong to AIDS as its ownmost),2 and that we can therefore no longer think of the future as the restoration of a putatively uncontaminated past; we have learned, perhaps, that so-called safer sex is not a state of being, and that latex is no guarantee of immortality; we, some of us, have learned the hard way (there being no easy way) the existential irrelevance of both hope and despair; we have learned that the fact that we both are and possess bodies means that our bodies are our unavoidable exposure to danger, that there never is, has been, nor can be a place of safety; more, that the fact of our embodiment is the fact of our utter nontranscendence, our nitude. And we have had to live the future scenario of which Stengers and Gille warned us in 1985; absolutely nothing has happened to deprive their question and their warning of their cogency, for we have seen technical advice pertinent to our pleasures pressed into the service of a thoroughly authoritarian, albeit thoroughly stupid, moralism. Indeed, safer sex discourse, including not only verbal admonition but an entire range of material and institutional practices, has become an essential part of an entire scienti c medical technology of social control such that all illness, disability, and death itself have become essentially moral failings rather than misfortunes. So, bearing in mind the continued pertinence of their question, let us return to Stengers and Gille. They wonder how we might understand the role of this advance
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guard of the pandemic. They refuse rst of all a moralist and functionalist reading in which the subjective position of this advance guard would be abstracted into an objective service to a collective good. But they also refuse to consider the advance guard collectively as a gure of an essentially military heroism. Most importantly, and undoubtedly with a certain reading of Kant in mind, they refuse any attempt to gure this advance guard as one that must choose between sacri ce and cowardice.3 Rather, they say, the gure is that of the utter fool, the one who in his life or in his death, does not want to serve as any model, but who accepts grave risks in the name of something that de nes his uniqueness, but also exceeds it, and so cannot be shared, but only recognized by others. The hero whose only reward, medal, or crowning glory for the risks he takes is the simple recognition of the exigencies that drive him. It is not our place to de ne these exigencies, this something. But we can recognize, down through the ages, the subversive insistence of this question of those who agree to expose their body to danger . . .What these heroes can teach us is in nitely more precious than the self-denial or unconscious of recorded heroes: they explore in their esh, for pleasure or from passion, what a body is, what it can and cannot tolerate. They tell us and remind us what we are in this case, producers and consumers of body uids. Living beings, in danger of life.4 Various interpretations, understandings, and rationalizations, not only of this passage but of the heroic utter fool, are of course possible. Aristotelians and Kantians, for example but among many others, would emphasize that the utter fool is at least in part not susceptible to the seductions of reason, because the utter fool, in his and/or her most fundamental existential comportment, renders homage to what of life is consecrated to pleasure, bios apolaustikos,5 and to that extent is excluded from participation in the abstract rationality that de nes the possibility of the polis. The psychoanalytically inclined might be tempted to say that the utter fool has surrendered to the seductions of the death drive. Which may, in fact, be true or true enough. But were we to pursue such a psychoanalytic inquiry, we would have to inquire rst of all into the curious status of a drive that is no longer unconscious, if ever it was; and concomitantly acknowledge that neither in Freud nor in Lacan is the death drive simply an explanation, but precisely an explanation that marks the limit of the interpretative and explanatory possibilities of psychoanalysis, the limit of a rationality proper to more than psychoanalysis. What I want to do in considering the gure of the utter fool is not to o er a better, more adequate interpretation of that gure, an interpretation and understanding that would thereby displace other interpretations; rather, I want to think about the ways in which the utter fool is something other, something more, than an object for interpretation and understanding (which is not to suggest that the utter fool somehow mysteriously evades all interpretation, but simply to engage what of the utter fool would remain in the exhaustion of every possible interpretation). Further, I want to think about that engagement as an engagement with the political as such, as the happening, in the fulguration and simultaneity the eclat of the unapprehendable
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now, within which the political as such appears, an engagement that is dangerous for every politics, but which seems to me unavoidable if we are to resist the seductions of our contemporary culture of political despair. For our problem today is not so much to choose between this or that politics as it is to make the political happen. Finally, I want to think about that engagement as a possibility by which we might engage the sexual and erotic pleasures that at once provoke gay and lesbian studies or queer theory, but also interrupt those inquiries, formal and informal, which have collectively constituted nothing so much as a forgetting and transcendence of queer pleasures, a ects, and passions as they enrapture bodies irreducible to the subjectivity that is nonetheless theirs: it is neither political, epistemological, nor moral subjects who know the unbearable sweetness of the fuck. So I want to say that in the gure of the utter fool Stengers and Gille have given us one among innumerable and for the most part anonymous gures of what I want to call queers honour. There is, in the gure of the utter fool, something essential to any thought of queers honour. Before I try to elaborate this thought of queers honour, let me emphasize that these gures are in principle innumerable and essentially anonymous. We can, of course, think of names to attach to this gure. For example: Gregg Arakis Luke in The Living End, Patient Zero in John Greysons Zero Patience, the unrepentant faggot in Diamanda Galass Plague Mass, the Scott OHara of Autopornography , the I that emerges in Ron Palmers poems or in Jean Genets ctions, many of Samuel R. Delanys characters in The Mad Man (but also, and no less, in The Motion of Light in Water), the notebooks of Gary Fisher, in multiple feminist traditions that insist upon the speci city of material bodies (and here the essentialist/constructivist debate is quite irrelevant), in gures as diverse and ultimately perverse as Lacans Antigone (and even, perhaps, his Empedocles), in the gure of David Wojnarowicz in all the work signed by one David Wojnarowicz, in the populace of Cyril Collards Les nuits fauves, and so on and so forth, but above all in all those whom we have encountered (which also means: all those utter fools we are) whether for a minute or a lifetime, no matter under bridges, in abandoned warehouses, in alleys, bars, and baths, in backrooms, dungeons, and gyms, in parks, sex shops, and bookstores: even, indeed, in bedrooms and, astonishingly, in classrooms. Precisely because the names we can attach to this gure of the utter fool are in nite and various (and in nitely various), they (a they that is also a we) bespeak in their/our singularity an essential anonymity. In this respect, we are, as Foucault says somewhere, the pseudopodia of sexuality. The utter fool may be a gure of queers honour, but he and/or she is not thereby a type or model; the utter fool is on no queens Birthday List of honours. Queers honour, then, consists in this: an unmotivated existential comportment toward, an existential attention to, what is, as such, unsurpassable. An empiricism? Undoubtedly, but a di cult empiricism impossible to codify, an empiricism quite other than the empiricisms of academic philosophy which nd their objects already constituted, their categories given, and what is always already subsumed within intelligibility. Queers honour is a comportment, an attention, that is something quite other than interpretation; it is a seeing irreducible to looking, a hearing irreducible to listening; it is the perversity of the singularity at stake when, in Jean-Luc Nancys phrase, touch touches touching, when the word withdraws from signi cation or
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when body uids no longer bear the glad tidings of intersubjective recognition.6 Queers honour is thus a comportment toward, an attention to, the unsublatable contingency and historicity of what is; more radically, it is an astonished a rmation of what is as its contingency and historicity. The perversity of queers honour lies in the rigour and discipline of its comportment toward and undivided attention to what remains as the supplement of every apprehension, however phenomenological, however psychological. It consists in an absolute delity to the fetish, the hardest and most honourable of all disciplines. This is the discipline and honour of the pornographic life, by which I mean a life irreducible to biography, meaning, and sense, life insofar as it does not give up, for the sake of transcendence, meaning, or mere intelligibility, on what of life is consecrated to pleasure. Queers honour is constituted in a loyalty to the contingent, the fragmentary, the empirical, not in spite or, nor even because of, their nitude, but as the nitude they most assuredly, as such, are. Thus, queers honour is an a rmation of the perverse pleasures and the bundle, as the Buddhists would say, of the a ects and passions that provoke its attention and comportment altogether, an attention, a comportment that are strictly speaking unmotivated. This unmotivated comportment and attention, after all, is the discipline that the fetish imposes, for the fetish is a signi er without a signi ed. A fetish is a fetish only in its singularity (which does not preclude either its anonymity or a certain promiscuity). If the fetish signi es, but signi es nothing but its signi ance, any attention to that fetish can only be unmotivated: one attends to the fetish for the sake of nothing but that attention, which is to say: for the pleasure of the thing. After all, not every breast is a good object, not every cock is a phallus. I have just spoken of the discipline and rigour of the pornographic life, of a life that does not give up on the bios apolaustikos that is the surplus of political and epistemological subjectivity. Why invoke porn? Because porn or, if you shy at the term, erotic art both in and in spite of its crudities, stupidities, and bad politics, does not, as porn, o er itself to a subject as an object for interpretation. This is not to say that porn cannot be interpreted or criticized, but that it is not to the gaze of a political or epistemological subject that it o ers itself. Neither, therefore, does it o er itself simply as a phenomenological or psychological technology for the achievement of pleasure. What is speci cally pornographic about porn is that it o ers itself as in itself sexually pleasurable, that in itself and as itself, it produces a pleasure that is no metaphor. Which is to say that porn o ers itself as the surplus of representation; porn is what in representation exceeds representation, it is what in the visual image or in the word can be neither transcended nor translated. Fassbinders Querelle and Genets Querelle do not translate each other; Fassbinders Querelle is no more merely a visualization of Genet than Genets Querelle is merely a script for Fassbinder, and it is precisely in that untranslatability that the erotic happens. There is neither symbol nor metaphor in Genet, and if we miss that fact, we miss entirely the intense eroticism of Genets texts. Genet himself made the point, albeit succinctly, in Funeral Rites: Flowers amaze me because of the glamour with which I invest them in grave matters and, particularly, in grief over death. I do not think they symbolize anything.7 Porn (or erotic art) is not a substitute for sexual pleasure, but o ers itself as sexual pleasure; insofar as it does so, its address is not to a subjects gaze, but to the bodys capacity for pleasure, its capacity to see more than it looks at, to hear more than it listens to, to think more than it conceives. The
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pornographic life is life insofar as it is attentive to those possibilities. And, if you recall your last heavy cruise, you will remember that the life lived pornographically is among the most rigourous of disciplines: pleasure, after all, is hard work.
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Does the pornographic life, life insofar as it is lived pornographically, irreducible to knowledge or its possibility, bespeak an aesthetics of existence? Yes, with two quali cations. First, that such an aesthetics of existence not be confused with any narrative that proceeds from perception as contemplation through phenomenological consciousness (which bears with it at least the possibility of knowing), to appreciation and judgment: no sex appreciation courses here. A pornographic aesthetics of existence never tells that story, and it does not tell that story because it refuses (such is its honour, such is its discipline) to redeem aisthesis in aesthetics, but remains steadfast in its attention to the material manifold in its sensuous sensuality and to the chaos of the a ects and passions. Second, consequent, quali cation: such an aesthetics of existence cannot be codi ed. It is not that there are no rules, but that by virtue of our inescapable historicity (our groundlessness), we necessarily make up the rules as we go.8 The pornographic life, an aesthetics of existence that is a relation to what is without relation, a relation of non-relation, therefore never becomes what is sometimes called a work of art. This queer aesthetics of existence, rather, belongs to arts work. Arts work is only coincidentally concerned with the production of the works of art that are its curiously irrelevant residue. Arts work is an existential comportment that in its very happening acknowledges that what is at issue is not a surface that presumptively conceals the depth of beings being, but the surface that is beings most profound depth. It is not simply that you are what you do, as if you had a choice in the matter, but that without that doing, you could not be. Thus, arts work is no transcendence, but like breathing, eating, and fucking the work of nontranscendence, the meticulous dimensions of life lived thoroughly by those in the process of losing it, as Aaron Shurin puts it.9 Arts work is the art of disappearance, a lesson in how to disappear, how to die: without this pornographic aesthetics of existence and the testimony of innumerable PLWAs bears witness to the fact there is literally no life to lose. Outside of this pornographic aesthetics of existence, this arts work that is at the same time an aesthetics of disappearance, there is no life. Pornographically speaking, sex (not excluding the technical disciplines of ascetic abstinence) is neither a form nor a way of life and of dying, but the Way itself; we all knew this once upon a time, but we have been humiliated, by safer sex discourse among much else, into abstraction. (Parenthetically, let me reiterate, and not for the last time this afternoon, that what is at stake in queers honour or a pornographic aesthetics of existence is not a matter of an escape from abstraction, political or epistemological subjectivities, or conceptualization, as if a pornographic aesthetics of existence were a mere alternative; neither is it a matter simply of a propaedeutic humiliation, a meditation on the aporias of knowing. Rather, it is a matter of an active, existential engagement [which does not exclude thinking] with what conceptuality and its attendant subjectivities can only imagine as their inessential surplus.) Granted that there can be no preemptive rule for a pornographic aesthetics of existence, and even less can there be a model of a queer Heldenleben , still, one might
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ask: what would it take to live the pornographic life? What are the techniques that would consecrate that life to pleasure? How do we learn a seeing that is something more than the gaze, a hearing that is something more than a listening; how do we learn to make touch touch touching? In a sense, in the sensuous sensuality of the senses, we already know, of course, but much must be unlearned in order to come to our senses. And one could do worse, much worse, than consult the technical manuals of Pat Cali a or Jim Prezwalski, among innumerable others as well as whoever is willing to assist in ones eldwork, of course. But what I have in mind for this talk is, sorry to say, perhaps less interesting. First, let me insist that the pornographic life begins and sustains itself in, and as, a certain ontological stammering, a certain recognition, necessarily inarticulate, that being is the most improbable of possibilities. Here is the necessity for the reinvention of the multiple improbable possibilities of bodies (as Stengers and Gille said, utter fools explore in their esh, for pleasure or from passion, what a body is, what it can and cannot tolerate); here is the necessity for the reinvention of language and of silence, of language in the sheer improbability of communication and of silence as something other than punctuation or hiatus; here, then, is the necessity for the reinvention, yet once again but always for the rst time, of thinking as something other than the production and administration of concepts. To come to this ontological stammering, we need techniques for unlearning the virtuosities of quotidian corporeal comportment, that is to say, for unlearning every possible phenomenology, every possible psychology (even as the passage to the obscene is necessarily, for part of the trip, at once phenomenological and psychological); we need techniques for unlearning the uency of speech and of silence in what passes for communication; we need techniques for unlearning the concepts putative mastery of the world; we need techniques for unlearning subjectivitys sovereignty. You undoubtedly know these techniques, techniques that collectively perhaps never amount to an ars erotica, a recipe, a ve-year plan, or a twelve-step programme and that precisely because they constitute a non-instrumental technology. Jean-Luc Nancy puts it like this a propos what he calls the arts (what I am trying to think as ` arts work): Technique is the obsolescence of the origin and the end: the exposition to a lack of ground and foundation, or that which ends up presenting itself as its only su cient reason, experiencing itself as radically insu cient and as a devastation of the ground, the natural, and the origin. Technique extends a withdrawal of the ground, and the most visible part of our history consists in this extension. Technique as such, in the common sense of the word, at the same time extends and recovers this Grundlosigkeit or Abgrundigkeit. This is why there is not technique but techniques and why the plural here bears the essence itself. It might be that art, the arts, is nothing other than the seconddegree exposition of technique itself, or perhaps the technique of the ground itself. How to produce the ground that does not produce itself: that would be the question of art, and that would be its plurality of origin.10
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So, what might have seemed to be a method, or at least a congeries of instrumental techniques, for getting from point A to point B, a phenomenologico-psychological transport from ordinary daily life to an essentially exceptional jouissance, proves to be neither instrumental nor exceptional, because, once arts work has been put into play (and it has always already been put into play), there is no outside of that play (as if being antedated its constitution), and it has no telos outside itself. It is an end in itself, and refers to nothing save itself: orgasms happen, but they are not the end of arts work. Which is to say that arts work including techniques as various as fetishization, tats and pierces, porn, the enunciation, bondage, pain, even the caress, the kiss, cunnilingus, sucking and the vanilla fuck for that matter confront conceptual thought ( let us use its nickname: philosophy) with its impossibility, and which cannot be recuperated for philosophy in any aporetics. Non-instrumental, unexceptional, the arts work of a pornographic aesthetics of existence, through the multiple proliferation of its techniques, renders unavoidable the impossible presence of the here, now (I have good reason for not saying the here and now: wait for it) that is necessarily, as I say, at once unavoidable and impossible for consciousness insofar as it serves the concept. A few examples. Consider your respective collections of whips, tit-clamps, dildos, whatever. Among the array will perhaps be some few that, by virtue of their speci c histories and associations, even if those histories and associations are entirely ctive, bear a certain charge that makes of this whip, that pair of tit-clamps, this dildo, something other than a particular example of its kind or universal category, something that makes of a treasured whip more than a whip or expression of whipness, something that makes of a cherished pair of tit-clamps more than merely one pair among an entire array, set, or class of tit-clamps, something other than the expression of the qualities that subsume one pair of tit-clamps within the universal category of tit-clamps. In other words, this whip, this pair of tit-clamps, this dildo, in the singularity that exceeds its mere particularity and which thereby resists subsumption absolutely (not by virtue of its unmarked purity as a logical subject but because it is nothing but the material surfeit of predicates), is a fetish. So, too, tats and pierces fetishize the esh. So the fetish as such, whatever else it may or may not be, whatever function it may or may not perform in psychic economies, renders homage to the singularity of things that is an impossibility for what we nickname philosophy. And the engagement with singularity can only happen here, now; fetish is the name we give to that engagement irreducible to its concept, least of all concepts of individuality or subjectivity. Second series of examples. The rst of which might be called an exercise in boredom, but the boredom of empty time rather than of the repetitive task; it is the boredom of nothing-to-do, an attention deprived of its objects, be they sensory or ideal. The technique of this boredom is that of a sensory deprivation as nearly perfect as possible, a technique of blindfolds, virtually insensible restraints, ear plugs, and the well-heated dungeon. This boredom is one of an in nite narcissism (that is, a narcissism rigorously pursued to its logical apotheosis), a being-alone-with-oneself in which one loses even the rare ed but nonetheless reassuring companionability of any autoa ectivity, a solitude beyond solitude; readers of Patrick Suskinds Perfume might recall JeanBaptiste Grenouilles seven years in the cave.11 If your own experience does not serve
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you here, any of the SM manuals currently on o er will tell you that this empty time is in fact the dissolution of temporality altogether. A phenomenological subjective temporality inner time consciousness gives way to a nothing-but here, now, a kind of simple or elemental ek-stasis. Here, now is nothing but pure a ect, consciousness without subject, the consciousness of the simple but astonishing fact of consciousness. In this absolute solitude of the here, now, past and future, there and beyond, do not exist; there is only (and it is this only that is literally impossible to think) the this not the this of this or that, nor the this of this thing, but the this simpliciter . Here, now, this is what is impossible for philosophy. In this respect, bondage and pain must be considered to be the extreme articulations of solitudes singularity, its non-relationality. Whether or not all pain is incommensurable, and whether or not pain is manageable, pain articulates the nontranscendence that nite esh, as such, is. Beyond a certain determinate but undetermined limit, pain exceeds the phenomenological or psychological self, and in that transgression exceeds every phenomenology or psychology. The I in pain is something other than any possible phenomenological or psychological I; it is not merely another I, but altogether other; it does not feel, but is, pain. Although she analyzed such an I as merely exceptional, Elaine Scarry provided a telling account of such a desubjecti cation (and therefore the unmaking of the world) in her wellknown study of The Body in Pain.1 2 In the extremity of pain, most assuredly including the pleasures of pain, pain is all the existence there is, all the world there is. Entirely other than a subject, esh in the plenitude of the pain that supplants every possible ontology is utter singularity, nothing-but its ownmost non-relationality. As such, it can be redeemed by no intersubjective relation. Virtually every discussion of SM I have seen insists upon a psychological, or at least phenomenological, analysis of the relation between sadist and masochist, top and bottom, master and slave. I do not want to say these analyses are necessarily wrong, but I do want to say they stop far short of their most radical possibility which is, to my mind, the possibility that the relation between sadist and masochist, top and bottom, master and slave, is, as a relation to the singularity of pain (and bondage), not a relation at all; and it is in this non-relationality that sadist and masochist, top and bottom, master and slave alike, accede to the unspeakable sovereignty of solitude. Their relation is, to borrow Blanchots vocabulary, the relation to what is without relation, the relation that nonrelation is (or, to cop Lyotards vocabulary, the relation of the dierend, constitutive of sociality altogether). If the relation of non-relation, the relation to the singularity that is the withoutrelation, is constitutive of sociality, it is because it is the revelation of the political as such, the fact of relationality altogether that is, power. A slogan, no less reductive than any other: the ontological is the political. What is at stake here is not a matter of this or that politics; there is no guarantee that this constitutes in itself a good or progressive politics, for what is at stake is the possibility of any politics whatsoever. Nor, however, is this revelation of the political the revelation of a ground, for it neither precedes nor survives its happening. Although this revelation changes both nothing and everything simultaneously, it does not thereby imply simply a dialectic between being and nothing. Finally, however rare it may seem, it is in no case exceptional, for the non-relation of singularity, unavoidable in the extremity of pain,
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subtends each, every, and any relation whatever. If this implies the ubiquity of power (because power is constitutive of quiddity as such), it is also the case and many of Foucaults readers rather conveniently forget this that this revelation is at the same time the revelation of the absolute contingency, and hence negotiability , of power. One does not need to be all that experienced in the arts of pain and bondage to recognize that the positions of sadist and masochist, top and bottom, master and slave, are entirely and essentially unstable; and it is precisely this consequent unjusti ability of power that liberal political philosophy occludes. In the course of his considerations of das Ding, a consideration that itself is not without its pertinence to our present inquiry, Lacan remarks that pain articulates a certain unavoidability: [W]e should perhaps conceive of pain as a eld which, in the realm of existence, opens precisely onto that limit where a living being has no possibility of escape.1 3 Lacan continues with a reference to architecture, Baroque architecture in particular, as a kind of tortured immobility; the point is that pain is simply an extreme form of bondage. In pain and in bondage, perhaps even in certain forms of more or less theatrical thralldom, immobility is what binds one to place (hence the erotics of cruci xion14 ); what is bound to place, however, is esh, a ect, and passion rather than the body as the habitation of the homunculus or a picture of the ego. Place, then, is not a place-in-space; place is not a location or point such as could be determined according to one or another cartography or geography; in this sense, place is not in-the-world. Place ultimately designates nothing-but the consciousness of consciousness. It is not my consciousness of a bodys ownmost pain, but pains consciousness that there is pain, pains autoa ectivity. In the ecstatic jouissance of pain, bondage, and sovereign solitude, place is the surplus of the Kantian a priori of space and time. Here, now, this is place. Place neither transcends nor supplants the Kantian a priori (which can only speak of the here and now); it is what remains in the aftermath of the sensuous and sensual subtraction of those abstractions. In place, the esh is bound to its pleasure because it is bound to (rather than for) death; because, that is to say, it is bound to its singularity. Now this thought of place, a thought of what at once provokes and interrupts thought, never resolves itself into a concept; to the extent that it is a concept, it is a concept of what essentially evades conceptuality altogether. And some of those we call philosophers have been attentive to this thought of place. Most important for my own attempts to think about place, for example, has been a 1926 essay on Place by Nishida Kitaro.1 5 More recently, Edward S. Casey has devoted two large volumes to the question; but it is symptomatic that on the one hand, Casey recuperates the question for the history of philosophy, and that on the other, he produces a phenomenology of the suburbs.1 6 Abstraction and phenomenology are the two dead ends that every attempt to think about place must avoid. The point would be irrelevant were it not that the spatial metaphor, which cannot but reduce place to an abstract point in space, has come to dominate much of cultural studies in general, and gay and lesbian studies and queer theory in particular. No wonder, then, that gay, lesbian, queer studies have become so thoroughly desexualized; even less might we wonder, then, at the utter irrelevance of most safer sex discourse. There are queer honourable exceptions, of course. Cindy Patton, for example, urges us to return to the obscene for what is our only possible inspiration; Samuel R. Delany has continued
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to do so in The Mad Man; and, for the purposes of my present argument most importantly, John Paul Ricco has written a stunning consideration of place in his recent doctoral dissertation.17
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Taking his clue from Deleuzes reading of Leibniz and Rajchmans reading of Deleuze, Ricco undertakes to think of place through multiple, apparently discrete, registers, including installation art, architecture, and cruising and public sex. What is most important in all of this is Riccos insistent argument that place is only ever a takingplace (references to Mallarme may be taken as read here); place exists only insofar as it happens and only in its happening; place is neither a ground for what is called an event, nor does it survive its happening. A park, an alley, an empty warehouse, are queer only in the queer sexual happenings that happen; thus, Ricco maintains, there is no such thing as queer space. The gure of this queer happening is neither the expanse of a putatively public plaza, nor the volume of a museums white cube; rather, if it has its gures, they are gures of the labyrinth and the hallway, a promiscuous congeries of here, nows in their anonymous singularities that, again, are the irreducible surplus of abstract cartographic location. Without this impossible thought of place as here, now, this there can be no thought of the essential mortality and therefore pleasure of esh. Thought must hold fast to this impossibility if it is to be pornographic; queers honour resides entirely in this holding-fast to the esh. A third and nal example of the techniques of the pornographic life, an example that bears immediately upon our work in the so-called humanities and social sciences. The sovereign master, our experience as well as technical manuals counsel, comports himself and/or herself in an essential reserve that amounts to an ontological reticence. Do not allow your comportment, or your speech as comportment, to reveal itself completely, for your sovereignty resides entirely in that very reserve; in suggesting that your power is, in fact if not in principle, illimitable; in suggesting that all that is is at your pleasure and ceases to be in the absence of that pleasure. Thus, silence that is, the noncommunication of what is without relation, but also the relation that is that nonrelation belongs to the techniques of pornographic sovereignty. Yet thereby silence is not merely non-communication, but the communication of non-communication: as the communication of non-communication, pornographic silence itself is an enunciation, the articulation of an unsurpassable dierend. In command, for instance. A command, whether from big Os or little Os, from drill sargeants, daddies, Victorian mistresses, the superego, or even God herself, articulates a dierend; there is something curiously and essentially silent in the command. And this silence that at once establishes and preserves a distance, a di erence, is silence because it is undecipherable (were it not, the question of why God commands Abraham to sacri ce Isaac would not be as essentially silly as it is), it is untranslatable, in fact the very event of untranslatability. Command does not belong to conversation and inaugurates no dialogic intersubjectivity. Command neither comes from reason, nor does it speak to reason. Command is the silence of speech, speechs ownmost silence. You can hear a command, but you can never listen to it; like the Law itself in Tokugawa Japan, it is to be obeyed but never known. All of which is to say that, in command, the word withdraws from signi cation, or signi es only the fact of signi cation. But this withdrawal of the word from signi cation, this essential silence of the enunciation as such, the very happening of signi ance, is precisely the indeterminate place where the comportment of the esh
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and the possibility of language must be continually reinvented; here, now, this, is the place of an ontological stammering where being itself (as if being were possessed of an itself ) stutters. A risky, unavoidable, business this. In Schreber, we call this ontological stammering psychosis (but what none of Schrebers interpreters and diagnosticians, from Freud through Santner, can countenance is the possibility that Schreber was right, that Daniel Paul Schreber was Gods own whore, the very obscenity of the Luder; and they cannot entertain this possibility of reading precisely because for them reading is nothing-but interpretation); in Genet we call it art; but queers honour demands that we also call it love. Of course, this withdrawal of the word from signi cation into the essential silence of the enunciation cannot simply be construed as a lack in and of language (an aporia), or as merely a limit of language, a hermeneutic horizon. Rather, it must be thought, insofar as it can be thought, in its supplementarity, as the silence that envelops every utterance, the non-communication that shrouds every communication; as in Schreber, Freud, and rather a large number of others, it must be thought as an inexhaustible surplus of signi cation. But the point is not merely to think about that surplus, but to engage it. Here, Genet is one of many possible guides. Earlier, I made the claim that there is no metaphor, no symbolism, in Genet. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that Genet always knows with a perfect congruency what he is saying; nor do I intend to argue that his meaning is perfectly intelligible to all (or any) of his readers. Rather, I have what I hope is a rather more discom ting claim to make: that Jean Genet not Jean Genet in scare quotes as gure, symbol, metaphor, trope, authorial or narrative voice, actant or subject position, but Jean Genet as a man of skin, esh, blood, bones, shit, cum, spit, and all the rest of it did not, indeed could not possibly, exist apart from his engagement with what of the word withdraws from signi cation, with language become fetish. I have not put this strongly enough; let me try again. It is not the case that once upon a time there was a man named Jean Genet who took up arts work as one of the ways of a life; rather, Jean Genet (this time stripped of the comfortable irony of scare quotes) existed in and as that arts work that was the life; apart from that pornographic engagement, there was, there could be, no Jean Genet. Period. God knows he told us this often enough, constantly, throughout his ve major novels; but we have listened to him so carefully, we have been such good interpreters (and Genet has fared quite spectacularly well in this respect), that we have not heard what is manifestly being said. When he tells us that his rst person pronoun, his I, exists only in the arts work of what are called his fantasies, and so insistently does he do this that the point is obvious, we must at least acknowledge (but cant we do better than mere acknowledgment?) that this writing literally, this pornography is not a second-order pursuit, but the very stu of life, the bundle of the a ects, passions, deliria, and so on by and as which autobiography exceeds the grasp of biography. Here, now, is where pornography emerges as the surplus of representation, where the I is something essentially other than the sign of subjectivitys possibility. Now the question that I mean to leave with you is this: why cant we do that? Why cant we, as historians, literary critics, philosophers, social scientists, students of gay and lesbian lives and cultures, queer theorists, cultural critics, whatever, engage arts work? Why cant we do something quite other, and very much more interesting,
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than what I have done this afternoon? There is a less polite way of asking this question: why are we so fucking boring? And, make no mistake about it, my dears, we are. Why are we content to live and work according to a motto that reads: dare to be dull? How is it that gay and lesbian studies and queer theory have become almost entirely sexless? Why are we afraid of the aestheticization of the political (as if the putatively anaesthetic forms of politics with which we are a icted have made us such a wonderful world)? Three caveats. First, these questions are not addressed only to those of us who devote our lives and energies to arcana of interest to maybe ve or six other like-minded scholars; indeed, I have a perhaps recidivist fondness and respect for such solitary devotions. Second, these questions do not concern the presumptive division between the academic and the extra-academic; the colloquial can be just as existentially boring as any jargon. Nor, third, is this the hoary question of relevance; whatever importance that question most certainly has in some respects, it is no less certainly itself quite irrelevant to my question. Finally, I do not mean to suggest that our work is without its passionate occupations, preoccupations, and fascinations, or that these are somehow worthless. What I do mean to say is that, by and large, we assume without questioning, without acknowledging even the possibility of a questioning, that intellectual work is nothingbut the production of knowledge or, at best, knowledge about the production of knowledge. We assume and our disciplinary, institutional, and epistemological protocols do nothing but reinforce this assumption that our job is to produce better interpretations and explanations of the world (or at least of bits and pieces of the world). But, beyond a certain epistemophilia, why would we ever want to know more about, or have a better explanation of the Tao te ching, the Shobogenzo , Stone Butch Blues, the Critique of Judgment, or Pompes funebres, for example? Surely a more profound ` engagement, a sexier engagement, is possible. Is it an accident, a simple oversight, that we do not yet have a truly and profoundly pornographic reading of the Critique of Judgment, a text that almost cries out for such a reading? In asking these questions, I am not calling for yet one more sociology of knowledge, or yet one more really boring phenomenology of ourselves. I am saying that without the queers honour of an attention to here, now, this; without an absolute devotion to the esh, its pleasures and possibilities, there is nothing gay or lesbian about our studies, nothing queer about our theory, precisely because it is in that attention, that devotion alone, that we stand a chance of hearing the voice of the utter fools we ourselves are; here, now, this is the only chance we have to make the political happen. Fuck well, my dears, and thank you.

Notes
1

Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille, Body Fluids, trans. Paul Foss, in Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science, trans. Paul Bains, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.237. 2 Aaron Shurin, Unbound: A Book of AIDS (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1997). Haver 20

See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1956), p.30. 4 Stengers and Gille, pp.237-38. 5 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I, ch. 5, 1095b. 6 Jean-Luc Nancy, Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One? (Conversation on the Plurality

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of Worlds), in The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp.1-39. 7 Jean Genet, Pompes funebres, published in one ` volume with Journal du voleur and Querelle de Brest (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p.689; trans. Bernard Frechtman, as Funeral Rites (NY: Grove, 1969) , p.166. 8 See Sue Golding, Sexual Manners, in Victoria Harwood et al.,(eds.), Pleasure Principles: Politics, Sexuality and Ethics (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.80-89. 9 Shurin, p.37. 10 Nancy, p.26. 11 Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, trans. John E. Woods, (NY: Knopf, 1986). 12 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (NY: Oxford, 1985). 13 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.) (NY: Norton, 1992), p.60.

14

See Christopher Fynsk, What remains at a cruci xion: Nietzsche/Bacon, in Sue Golding, (ed.), The Eight Technologies of Otherness (London: Routledge, 1997), pp.79-104. 15 Nishida Kitaro, Basho, in Nishida Kitaro zenshu, Abe Yoshishige et al., (ed.) 2nd ed. (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1966-68) , vol. 4, pp.208-289. 16 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), and The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 17 Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Samuel R. Delany, The Mad Man (NY: Masquerade, 1994); John Paul Ricco, Fag-O-Sites: Minor Architecture and Geopolitics of Queer Everyday Life, Ph.D. diss. in art history, University of Chicago, 1997.

William Haver is an Associate Professor of History and Comparative Literature, Binghamton University; author of The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS (Stanford University Press, 1996) . e-mail address: whaver@binghamton.edu

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