Beyond the Grave

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Beyond the Grave
• Austin Svedjan (bio)

Some of us came to bury antirelational queer theories at the 2005 special session on the antisocial thesis.

—José Esteban Muñoz, "Thinking Beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer Critique"

I want to wager the following indecency: Leo Bersani welcomed his death and avoided his dying but importantly failed at both. One initial justification for so crass a claim could be that, despite a prolific career, he never edited a special issue. The generic injunction of special issues, after all, is to stake their import on the refusal to bury things. Even as titles flirt with the possibility of theoretical demise, special issues often justify their own publication by animating emergent concepts, resuscitating old ones, and immortalizing key figures in attendant debates.¹ In the case of the 2014 special issue of Social Text commemorating the life and thought of José Esteban Muñoz, this editorial tendency toward the conceptual extends to Muñoz himself. As one contributor notes, "the problem that animates this special issue: José Esteban Muñoz should not have died, but how do we continue to think and live with him (and each other) in spite of this loss?" (Chambers-Letson 14). But in saying that Bersani might have advocated for his death but not his dying, I don't mean to revivify queer theory's love of hagiography and claim that while the body of the man has died, the body of his work lives on. Instead, that distinction evokes Bersani's continual grappling with a problem over the course of his career through his speculation on how to loosen the death-grip that difference and its violent dramas have on our available modes of relationality. The hope was that such a loosening need not necessitate our physical deaths. As Bersani wrote in the closing paragraphs of 1987's "Is the Rectum a Grave?": "if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared—differently—by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death. Tragically, AIDS has literalized that potential as the certainty of biological death" (222). But the attempt to wrest relationality from its variously murderous, suicidal, or otherwise death-driven violences and the threatening differences that incite it, we shall see, proves overwhelmingly problematic. In this special issue that problematic inheres in the term "the antisocial."

The Citational Gimmick

In referring to "the antisocial" in this way, especially in proximity to Bersani—and partly against the inclination of special issues—this special issue attempts to lay to rest what has been termed "the antisocial thesis in queer theory" by reclassifying it as conceptual dead weight. Coined by Robert L. Caserio as the title of a 2005 panel organized by the Modern Language Association's Division on Gay Studies in Language and Literature, the "thesis" subsequently proliferated in an oft-cited 2006

PMLA forum of the same name explicating the presentations delivered by Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Muñoz, and Tim Dean. Attributing the thesis's formulation to Bersani's now-immortal suggestion in 1995's Homos that there is "a potentially revolutionary inaptitude—perhaps inherent in gay desire—for sociality as it is known," Caserio sets Bersani and other "explorations in queer unbelonging" against the historical backdrop of an ascendant "gay rage for normalizing sociability" (819). While queer theorists anxiously watched as gays and lesbians readily embraced normative forms of social life, the apparent advantage of Bersani's claim came to be staked on being against "the social" itself. The debate that ensued from that 2006 forum implicated much of queer theory's broader conceptual lexicon—queerness, normativity, affect, and politics, to name only a few—as sites of definitional and instrumental dispute. Still today, we are often told, these debates remain protracted, at least ongoing if not still critically topical (Kahan 811). And indeed much ink has been and continues to be spilled over appearances of "the antisocial thesis" and its conceptual kin, to the extent that terms like "antisocial," "negativity," "antirelationality," and "antiutopianism" have all undergone the theoretical rigor mortis that produces everything from intradisciplinary shorthand to introductory primers.^2...