Not Just Antisocial, Inhuman

Abstract

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• Not Just Antisocial, Inhuman
• John Paul Ricco (bio)

Why the antisocial? Given the pervasiveness of social media and constant reminders in the wake of COVID isolation and social-distancing policies and in the midst of "the loneliness epidemic" that human beings are innately social and communal creatures, the proposition of the antisocial, let alone any prospect of its relevance today, would seem to be implausible and improbable. So why would one want to take up the notion of the antisocial and its afterlives (in the plural) now? Good reasons might lie in the ongoing dismantling of the social welfare state, the privileging of the entrepreneurial individual in neoliberal political economy, the rise of anti-democracy movements and authoritarianism, and weekly mass shootings—all easily labelled as "antisocial." But also because of the great amount and diversity of political action against sexual violence, gender discrimination and segregation, the assault on the very being of trans-subjects, the fight for reproductive rights and other forms of bodily autonomy, state and police violence, and the insistence within the polity that Black Lives Matter. In other words, all those activities whereby the political entails the fundamental questioning of the way in which the social is currently constituted (as discriminating, marginalizing, and inequitable), and whereby the social's configuration is radically re-imagined according to principles of justice for all.

Looking back nearly twenty years to Robert Caserio's framing of "the antisocial thesis in queer theory" for the conference roundtable debate he organized at the MLA conference in 2005—and specifically his identification of Leo Bersani's book Homos as the Ur-text of that thesis, published ten years earlier (1995)—we note that a different yet historically related set of political attitudes motivated both Bersani's critique of the social as it was known and Caserio's interest in returning to that critique ten years later: the politics of respectability that had come to dominate gay and lesbian politics in the 1990s, a trend that shows no signs of subsiding ("Love is love!"). Meaning that Bersani's and Caserio's targets were the gay and lesbian policymakers of various stripes wanting to prove themselves and the cohort in whose name they spoke to be worthy and exemplary citizens and indeed patriots of the state (especially in, but not limited to the context of, the United States). In his 1997 lecture, "Gay Betrayals," (a double-edged title that should be read as referring to both those gays and lesbians who betrayed the radical queer tradition by pursuing assimilationist politics, and to those queers who betrayed identity politics and the state-sanctioned sociality for which that politics works) Bersani scathingly takes aim at "micro-politicians": self-fashioned good citizens campaigning to become members of the most powerful institutions of state-based imperial, colonial, and capitalist power (military, church, marriage, and the family).¹ This was a politics driven by a desire no longer to be excluded but to belong and to be included, to willingly subscribe to the liberal utopianism of "anticipatory progress" and its pastoralizing promises of reparation and redemption, and to do one's part in advancing the future of this illusion and reproduction of the social, going so far as to fully inscribe oneself into the bio-political economy via biological reproduction. With the political goal seemingly to have been to render oneself indistinguishable from others (straights), Bersani was not mistaken to think that what this politics of recognition and respectability amongst gays and lesbians would inevitably lead to was exactly what hetero-patriarchy and the Christian conversative radical right wing in the States was simultaneously plotting: the eradication not only of homosexuality but also of homosexuals.

It is undeniable that the political context of Homos and of the antisocial thesis has been entirely forgotten in the many critiques of either that book or that thesis over the past nearly three decades. Accused of being ahistorical, it is Bersani who has suffered from a degree of ahistoricism that should give us pause, especially as we contemplate many of the prevailing and dominant theoretical discourses today—including queer theory and its recent variants—oriented around the symbolic, the affirmation of identity, and the...