Rome-sacking and barebacking: longing, rhetoric, and revolution in Augustine and queer theory

Abstract

ABSTRACT Augustine’s sermon on ‘The Sacking of the City of Rome’ appears to lack the pastoral rhetoric that readers of his Confessions are so familiar with. This paper recovers the pastoral dimension of Augustine’s discourse by reading it alongside recent reinterpretations of barebacking subculture in queer theory. Maia Kotrosits argues that the rhetorical turn in the categorization of HIV/AIDS produced senses of asynchrony, and that barebacking responds to these by rooting the individual in an irreversible timeline of HIV-positivity. Barebacking can therefore be read as ‘pastoral’ rhetoric that resolves the agony of uncertainty. Augustine’s sermon is pastoral in this sense; Augustine imposes an historical ending that resolves the temporal anxiety he and his contemporaries felt after the sack of Rome in 410. Nevertheless, writing an ending – pastoral as that may be – can be a violent process if it negates or replaces the revolutionary work of making history.