This is from a paper I wrote looking at Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and an essay by Cora Diamond from the collection Philosophy and Animal Life. Not sure what it’s worth but David asked for it so here ya go:

The knowledge repels me. It fills me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it…the knowledge we have is not abstract—‘All human beings are mortal, I am a human being, therefore I am mortal’—but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can…What I know is what a corpse cannot know: that it is extinct, that it knows nothing and will never know anything anymore. For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same time.[1]

The contradiction here is the same as in Hughes’ poem with its capacity to “shoulder out/One’s own body from its instant heat,” like the photograph in Barthes’ Camera Lucida that pricks us with the knowledge of our own precariousness but paradoxically allows us to live beyond our death. In this passage, Costello touches upon a wound that marks our bodies as human and haunts us in the moments when we face the difficulty of reality—the specter of our own death. If, as Diamond maintains, “Coetzee’s lectures ask us to inhabit a body,” it is the body in a sense, of a corpse, or rather, a body wounded by the immanent death it always already signifies. [2] This woundedness belongs then to an economy of unintelligibility (“knowing what a corpse cannot know”) and epistemological vulnerability (“before my whole structure of knowledge collapses”), but it is correspondingly an embodied knowledge and therefore also an ontological vulnerability. We might align this sense of woundedness as an affect of anxiety—not merely its emotion or feeling—and as such it becomes a way of rethinking embodiment that does not rely on the subject or transcendence.[3]

To “live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can” suggests that this state of woundedness is part of the “ontology” (Being) of hauntology, and that the wound itself serves as a kind of specter for the subject. Throughout her essay, Diamond repeatedly refers to Costello as a woman haunted by her wound, a wound that is uncanny by virtue of its not being properly dead or alive, human or inhuman, but a specter that disturbs these very categories.[4] The spectral-as-uncanny is that which resists the kind of philosophical dialectic logic Costello herself defies. It will not allow us to grasp it—we can only receive it as a gift, in the Derridian sense, as one that is opened to the other’s singular heterogeneity and radical alterity. The possibility of the impossibility of such a gift, its resistance to logical thought, incites anxiety. As Diamond puts it, “to feel oneself being shouldered out of how one thinks” involves “profound isolation.”[5] The affect of anxiety that afflicts Costello accurately captures Diamond’s difficulty of reality as that which “unsettles the very foundations of what we call ‘the human.’”[6][7]

The question of the animal is intimately bound up with the haunting and uncanny figure of the other that incites anxiety, for what is an animal if not the other—a spectre that both constitutes and threatens the frame of what it means to be “human”? Derrida affirms this when he states, in his exposition on the animal, The Animal That Therefore I Am, that “The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will ever have done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.”[8] Derrida traces the concept of the animal in philosophy as an other that exists rhetorically to serve man’s autobiography, that is to say, to define the human as that which it is not.[9] In this sense, as Derrida points out, we as humans always come after the animal; we follow the animal.

What unhinges Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals is a double wound: on one hand it is directly tied to the knowledge of the “otherness” of the animal and how we humans react to that otherness indifferently or with active violence, even in light of our own “bodily sense of vulnerability to death,”[10] but she is also haunted by the equally terrible knowledge of her own inability to adequately come to terms or to express the horror she feels in light of that violence. This latter wound Costello invokes at the end of Coetzee’s text, when, after her son asks her why she is so consumed by “this animal business” she replies, “[I] dare not tell you why…when I think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground.”[11] But this failure to speak—and we must remember here that speech is that which supposedly separates the human from nonhuman animal—is not Costello’s personal failure (i.e., not related to her desire to “save her soul”); it is rather, the failure of language itself. As Stanley Cavell, in his response to Diamond’s essay, notes, “When we put, or try to put, that experience in words, the words fail us, the words don’t do what we are trying to get them to do.”[12] Derrida spoke of this failure as a wound present in language perpetually haunted by its own absence, that is, the dissemination of meaning. Derrida also, like Diamond and Costello, criticized philosophy’s attempts to control or deny the rupture of meaning inherent even in its disembodied/abstract language, which he juxtaposed to the poetic language of literature that flaunts and plays with the unstable core of language and meaning, and furthermore characterizes our thinking about the animal.[13] It is precisely this play of difference or différance that engenders the affective embodiment Diamond leaves us with at the end of her essay when she says, “that coming apart of thought and reality belongs to flesh and blood.”[14]

Derrida’s assertion of the violence innate in language, a violence that is especially evident when we think of the animal, might serve as a helpful corollary to our discussion here. I have already demonstrated it. To delineate, through language, the animal as such—without respect to the vast and multiple differences between species—is itself a violent gesture. In an interview that would make up a portion of, ironically, his (auto-)biographical film, Derrida articulates this violence thus: “To put all living things that aren’t human into one category is, first of all, a stupid gesture—theoretically ridiculous—and partakes in the very real violence humans exercise towards animals.” Historically, philosophy has been especially guilty of this discursive violence towards what we call the animal.[15] Derrida further considers the violence of the individual naming of animals by analyzing the Genesis myth in the Hebrew Bible, where God brings the animals to Adam “to see what he would name them.”[16] The naming of the animal here inscribes both its birth into the world of signification, but also announces “a death to come in the surviving of a ghost, the longevity of a name that survives whoever carries that name. Whoever receives a name feels mortal or dying precisely because the name seeks to save him, to call him and thus assure his survival.”[17] Like the photograph we discussed in relation to Hughes’ poem, the name that marks the specific animal’s anticipated death also allows the animal to survive its own death, because its name stands in as a placeholder for its entire species. The denial of any kind of individualization within species here precludes any possibility of mourning the animal, and this denial of mourning, as Derrida, Judith Butler, and others have shown, is a particularly violent political act and forecloses the relation of mourning as vital to a Derridian conception of ethics.[18]

Then the question: what to do in light of this violence that is at once discursive/epistemological and visceral/embodied? Diamond says we must acknowledge “poetry, rather than philosophy, as having the capacity to return us to such a [true] sense of what animal life is,” but does not seem to put much weight in this solution when, at the end of her essay, she ignores a direct answer to the objection that even poetic language cannot exactly “fit or fail to fit reality.”[19] She does affirm the value of affect and embodiment, but not in a mode that seems particularly helpful or tangible. Perhaps we can return to Coetzee and Elizabeth Costello for an answer here:

If I do not convince you, that is because my words, here, lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted, unintellectual nature, of that animal being. That is why I urge you to read the poets who return the living, electric being to language; and if the poets do not move you, I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.[20]

The appeal here is to live with—to “break bread with”—our animal neighbors, even or perhaps especially, in the moment in which they face their own violent death.[21] This begs the question: can we “come to terms” with this pervasive violence that belongs to our every day lives as we actively seek to live, embodied, side by side with that which we call the animal? As Costello desperately implores herself: “This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?”[22] The answer Costello receives from her son in the last line of Coetzee’s lectures—“There, there. It will soon be over”—returns us to the precariousness of our own human lives in the face of death, a death we share with what we call “the animal.” But it is also not properly an answer, since it fails to address the “why” of her question. The point here is, I think, that there is no proper answer, and that this state of questioning, this inability to come to terms with her anxious wound that reveals the limits of her thinking, is the beginning of ethics and politics and is, as Derrida maintains, aligned with justice.[23] Any just political action then, as Costello, tells us, cannot originate from a calculated cognitive function. Lear makes this clear in his description of radical hope as aligned with Plenty Coups’ dream outside the realm of logic, and Derrida too, confirms this when he says,

However careful one is in the theoretical preparation of a decision, the instant of the decision, if there is to be a decision, must be heterogeneous to the accumulation of knowledge. Otherwise, there is no responsibility. In this sense not only must the person taking the decision not know everything… the decision, if there is to be one, must advance towards a future which is not known, which cannot be anticipated.[24]

"Unlike Derrida, what is affirmed is not a form of haunting or afterliving (sur-vie) that interrupts and dislocates the organic form of a living being but the pulsing force of a nonorganic and impersonal life that has infinitely greater vitality than any organism. Indeed, Deleuze suggests that organisms do not genuinely embody life but trap and imprison it within an organized form. Organic life is only a form that actualizes the virtual singularities of the plane of immanence by stratifying the flow of forces and constraining singularities in individuals."

-Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism

"In other words, the force of materiality is nothing other than the constitutive exposure of (the subject of) power to the other. For if the freedom of the rational subject comes in or as its response to the other, then decision is prompted by and also comes from the other. It is therefore in the original instance passive and unconscious, not active and conscious, unlike the sovereign decision of exception (Schmitt) and the deliberation of public reason (Habermas). The force in question is not a counterpower that can be deployed against a given state of power. It is not the dispersal of power into a mobile field of relations between micropowers (Foucault). It is instead the constitutive exposure of power as such, which has been conventionally thought in terms of the circular economy of appropriation or the return-to-self of self-mastery, to what makes it vulnerable and defenseless. As the undoing of the power of the subject, the force of materiality cannot lead to a political program. Indeed, it is what resists and confounds any teleology such as that of Marxism and even any purposive or end-oriented action that is based on rational calculations or the projection of an ideal end. But as that which opens power up unconditionally to the other, this force also has a messianic dimension. It aporetically implies an absolute or incalculable hospitality to the other that demands a response in which we calculate with given conditions in order to act in a responsible manner."

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Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism

Wherein Pheng shows why Derrida owns Habermas, Butler, and even Foucault.

"To think of matter outside the oppositions that have imprisoned it therefore requires us to think of matter outside opposition itself, including the oppositions that most patently denote opposition, the inside / outside and subject/ object pairs. In its interdefinability with text, matter exceeds and confounds the oppositions between the positive and the negative, the immediate and the mediated, presence and its representation. We have conventionally mistaken this materialist understanding of text for a form of linguistic constructionism because we have not framed it through the problem of time. For the implied question here is why is it that matter is text-ite or woven? Why is it that any present being always overflows itself and intimates an absolute alterity? Derrida’s point is that in order to be present, any being must persist in time. This means that the form of the thing - that which makes it actual- must be identifiable as the same throughout all possible repetitions. But this iterability implies that any presence is in its very constitution always riven by a radical alterity that makes it impossible even as it makes it possible. By definition, this alterity cannot be a form of presence. Because it both gives and destabilizes presence, it subjects presence to a strict law of radical contamination. Strictly speaking, this force or dynamism, if we can use these words, is inhuman. It is prior to any figure of human consciousness such as the subject, reason, or spirit, and even practical action. Nor does it issue from anthropologistic structures that are commonly viewed as constituting reality through negativity or mediation such as society, culture, or language. In Derrida’s view, these are all forms of presence."

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Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism

Re: WHY DERRIDA IS NOT A “SOCIAL/LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTIVIST”

"In these tantalizing hints of what a deconstructive materialism might involve, Derrida suggests that we might understand matter through the figure of the text in general. This figure depicts the opening up or overflowing of any form of presence such that it becomes part of a limitless weave of forces or an endless process or movement of referral. In contradistinction, a metaphysical concept of matter regards materiality either as the endpoint of this movement of referral or as an external presence that sets off and secures this movement. Matter as presence is the arrestation of the text in general. It is important to add here that this movement is not the “free play” of textual indeterminacy, the joyful interpretive anarchy celebrated by deconstructive literary criticism. Paul de Man’s definition of the text as an endlessly self-referential object that only offers an allegory of its own reading is well known. Derrida, however, immediately undermines such auto-referentiality by emphasizing the importance of materialism as a philosophy of the outside. It is important to understand the text as matter, he emphasizes, so as to prevent us from lapsing into a new idealism of the text as a self-interiority without an outside. For whether it is denigrated as contingent exteriority (as in Hegelian idealism) or celebrated as the actuality of sensuous corporeal existence (as in Marxist materialism), matter has always been the outside….Yet Derrida also warns us that this exteriority must not be thought in simple opposition to the inside"

-Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism

LUuUUHHHHV I don’t get enuff of it

(Source: letterstosasha)

waiting for sechs as political praxis

kelzbelz: its just so much harder these dayz to get laid
i mean i feel dat
BUT ITS GONNA HAPPEN
waiting for the event
future-to-come
its ethix

suck it, lee edelman

To reduce desire to the regime of the One or the Same—even to name it under a phallocentric economy either as the dominant heternormative center or as its negative  Other—would be to replace or subsume the absolute hetereogeneity and rhizomatic movement of the desire-machine to a static desire-as-lack. Queer time and space—what I will refer to as a haunted/becoming temporality and virtuality—allows us to disrupt the normalizing schema, whether hetero- or homo-normative, of what Dana Luciano has called chronobiopolitics. As with most theoretical projects then, this paper deals with certain (queer) possibilities of/for resistance, but a resistance that cannot be reduced to representation (political or otherwise) or rely on a free and willing subject-agent. However, given the out-of-joint existence that queers live, there is a political and ethical imperative of responsibility to the other and of committing ourselves to the justice of radical critique. This critique can only be just in a queer conception of time as becoming or as haunted/out of joint, and therefore relies on a certain conception of the future-to-come.

…

This waiting for the other and for the event makes possible any justice not reducible to the law, and it is always tied to a spirit of radical “infinite critique.” A refusal to posit ends, to conceptualize the future as a culminating utopic telos, is what allows us to wait for the (radically) other—for an event that is always already prefigured by a certain specter to which we must remain accountable in order to be just. These ghosts, queer by virtue of their radical alterity and disturbance of ontological and epistemological frames, belong neither and both to the past and future. They represent the real loss of life we paradoxically fail to mourn—as Derrida describes the mourning of a loss that is never properly lost—that returns as a specter that wounds and will continue to wound—to remain an open wound for—the queer community (the devastation of HIV, the sanctioned and pervasive violence against queer people at the hands of the State and other institutions, etc.). But these specters are also before representation and signification, of a difference prior to these forms of queer identity, of a kind of “absence” (in the Derridian sense, not of the negative, but of alterity) that makes any presence possible. Queers themselves occupy a kind of unintelligible space and time, and as such we are particularly exposed to this vulnerability that manifests itself as an apparent loss or negativity (“the genesis of the appearance of negation”), but is actually more deeply rooted in a productive movement of difference that is “the genesis of affirmation.”[1] An affirmation of this precariousness could not rely on negation then, or a nihilistic rejection of the future, rather this affirmation is necessary to think the future at all and it relies on a certain kind of waiting that is itself vulnerable to the unpredictability of the future, a radical uncertainty that Merleau-Ponty describes at “the Terror of history.”[2]

…

I do not mean to elide the very real loss and trauma that has haunted queer life and politics. I mean only to say that this loss is not an absence or negation but a generative movement that itself allows for queer life and politics and begs a responsibility to and before those we have lost and will lose. This loss that haunts is not properly present or absent, but exists at the limits of being and thinking, that is, in a hauntology. This loss does not belong to a Hegelian negativity that relies on the logic of the Same, rather it initiates a moment of the in-between, the intermezzo, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, of becoming that marks the present. But this present would not be possible without the trace of the past and the future always already haunting it from within (as opposed to from outside), of an absolute difference that is “no longer in the form of an external difference which separates, but in the form of an internal Difference which establishes as a priori relation between thought and being.”[3] A queer ethics and a concern for justice cannot occur then without an affirmation of difference and a certain thinking of the future…

[1] Deleuze, 206.

[2] Merlou-Ponty, Maurice. Humanism and Terror.

[3] Deleuze, 86.

queer theory with Kelie

Evie Cheeks: centipedes
Evie Cheeks: eeeeeeeeeeee
Evie Cheeks: i hate them
rhizombie: OH THOSE ARE DISGUSTING
rhizombie: they gross me out more than anything
rhizombie: like all those legs
rhizombie: not normal
rhizombie: really fucking gross
Evie Cheeks: HETEROFASCIST
rhizombie: dude if there was a gay centipede i'd be totally down with the gay part
rhizombie: but i would still be grossed out by the legs
rhizombie: what am i even saying