Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10407391-10713819
Lucia Hulsether
This article interrogates feminist frameworks for understanding the racial and sexual politics of United States secularism. It theorizes the history of religious freedom law as a history of racial performance. Reading the aesthetic practices surrounding the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case and the subsequent consumer culture flurry around Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and building on accounts of religious freedom law as a vehicle for launching competing rights-based claims, the author shows the processes through which Hobby Lobby’s Christian family secured its religious exemption by conjuring ghosts of settler dispossession of indigenous people, even as an elderly Jewish justice was made to refuse submissive white femininity in the likeness of rapper Biggie Smalls. Circulated as competing minstrel brands, both performances consolidate the anti-Black and settler colonial grounds on which religious freedom laws—as well as some forms of mainstream protest against them—have flourished under neoliberal capitalism.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10407391-10713791
Elizabeth Freeman
Talia Schaffer has noted that care work needn’t be joined with the feeling of care. This article extends this insight to explore medical kink (“sadomedicine”) as a form of distantiated yet attuned care work that resituates the literary debates on symptomatic versus surface reading. Through the performances of Bob Flanagan, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s 1882 novel Doctor Zay, the 1991 film Misery and its source novel, and Maria Beatty’s 2009 film Bandaged, sadomedicine is situated as an engagement with symptoms that delights in surfaces but that might also exacerbate symptoms, introduce them from outside the text, and/or attend to symptoms disconnected from deep pathologies. The term “parasymptomatic reading” conceptualizes this play with symptoms and the surface/depth distinction: it captures the role of the parasympathetic nervous system and its connection to surface bodily responses, the dialectic of sympathy and symptomaticity, and the meaning of the prefix “para” to indicate both proximity and error.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10407391-10713847
Akrish Adhikari
This article studies the role of the typewriter in the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). When a printing press was unavailable during the war, women militants used the typewriter to process articles for El Moudjahid, the designated newspaper of the anticolonial revolutionaries. Providing a media history and theory of this event, the article argues that the typewriter—both woman and machine—was an active militant who cut texts and bodies to advance the revolutionary cause. The typewriter denaturalized assumptions about the newspaper’s colonial appearance, thus bringing forth a new form for anticolonial journalism.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10407391-10713833
Steven Swarbrick
Freud’s readings of Shakespeare are notorious for their universalizing claims about human sexuality. What is less commonly noticed, and what this article foregrounds, is the asexuality that underwrites psychoanalytic theories of sex. Venus and Adonis shows that Shakespeare’s poem is replete with asexual encounters. In other words, it is not Adonis alone who spurns sexual romance. Venus’s insatiable kissing is a textbook example of Freud’s point about the paradoxicality of sex: when it comes to the pleasures of kissing, Freud says, “It’s a pity I can’t kiss myself.” This essay reads asexuality not as a particular orientation; rather, it asks how asexuality, psychoanalysis, and Shakespeare disorient our readings of sex.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10407391-10713805
Patrick Teed
This article proposes that a brutal empiricism, constituted in abolitionism’s originary iterations, authorizes contemporary abolitionist politics, interrogating how the focalization of the prison over slavery reveals politicallibidinal investments in the reproduction of antiblackness. It argues that asserting the prison as the object of abolition both presumes and reifies an antiblack historiography, repeating the ruse of Emancipation (therefore imagining racial slavery to be a historical condition) while simultaneously deploying slavery’s idiom to animate a contemporary postracial politics. To arrive at this critique, the essay offers an analysis of the epistemic brutality subtending abolitionist politics during the long nineteenth century to put pressure on its circulation within ostensibly radical political imaginaries today. In other words, it argues that just as the originary abolitionists distorted the political demands of the enslaved to consolidate liberal humanism, so, too, do contemporary deployments of abolition similarly sediment enslavement as a regime of power.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10407391-10435520
Kris Cohen
In Leo Bersani’s essay “Sociality and Sexuality,” bracketing emerges as a critical procedure for sensing and for practicing nonsovereign forms of sociality. Following Foucault’s desire to discover modes of relation, forms of the homosexual, that do not yet have a world for their reception, Bersani brackets the literature on sociality and sexuality that has come before, including his own, which variously posits the homosexual and the queer as figures of radical negation. Averse to such recuperations of the sovereign self, Bersani’s bracketing instead makes space for the homoerotic as a set of fragile, experimental modes of relation in which the self is neither an enemy nor a heroic site of resistance.
在利奥·贝尔萨尼(Leo Bersani)的文章《社会性与性》(Sociality and Sexuality)中，包围法作为感知和实践非主权形式的社会性的关键程序出现。福柯渴望发现关系的模式，同性恋的形式，这些还没有一个世界可以接受，贝尔萨尼将之前出现的关于社会性和性的文学，包括他自己的文学，用不同的方式将同性恋和酷儿作为激进否定的人物。为了反对这种对主权自我的恢复，贝尔萨尼的分类反而为同性恋者创造了空间，作为一组脆弱的，实验性的关系模式，在这种关系模式中，自我既不是敌人，也不是反抗的英雄场所。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10407391-10435843
Lee Edelman
Focusing on a passage where Leo Bersani addresses the intensity of his attachment to many of his first sentences—sentences that seemed to come all at once and to betray his own understanding of the topics they introduced—this essay considers that betrayal in relation to his view of homosexuality as betraying the seriousness of statements. By examining how the latter betrayal gets enacted in the betrayal his sentences perform, it identifies the tension in Bersani’s work between an explicit resistance to the “de-gaying” he associates with queer theory and the “de-gaying” impulse of his own work, which made it central to queer theory itself.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10407391-10435927
Damon Ross Young
Leo Bersani’s writings on aesthetics, often coauthored with Ulysse Dutoit, repeatedly deploy the trope of withdrawal, finding in the aesthetic works they discuss, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s film Contempt, a paradoxical double movement of bringing into view while projecting the erasure of form and distinction. In their reading of Contempt, Bersani and Dutoit adumbrate a uniformity that would depend on the elimination of measurement, reference, and subject-object relations. In doing so, they transfigure the idea of antirelationality often attributed to Bersani, associating the death it surely names with the illumination of Being.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10407391-10435464
John David Rhodes
This essay considers Bersani and Dutoit’s alignment of passivity and the aesthetic in “Merde Alors,” their essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salò. Passivity is a key strategy for the production of works of art and is key to understanding the mode of the aesthetic itself. The question of passivity appears elsewhere in Bersani’s work, and “Merde Alors”—in whole or in part—was republished at key moments in Bersani’s career. This essay gestures toward why “Merde Alors” has had such an interesting and prolific afterlife.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10407391-10435787
Karen Redrobe
This essay explores Leo Bersani’s use of intellectual uncertainty, openness, and tautness in his writing to create a space for thinking about “what is politically unfixable in the human” (Homos 71). In particular, this essay, which travels under the banner of the word perhaps, pays attention to Bersani’s first brief, then extended response to Jean Genet’s statement (in the context of his play, The Maids), “I suppose that there is a union for domestic servants—that is not our affair.”
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