Sicut Palea: It Must Be So Sweet to Die

Abstract

Along a winding path made even less direct by numerous, necessary digressions, the preceding chapter led us to the origin of so-called antisocial theories. The queer, as I have tried to explain, both in the political practice of activist movements and in academic theories, is born from a dual trauma, which entered the sexual minorities’ imaginary during the eighties: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. In this depressive climate, on campuses in the United States, the constructivist theory of sexuality bequeathed by Foucault represented an instigation to resume a directionless hedonistic activism geared toward the experimentation of new ways of life, and such activism was met with varying responses. In general, the first queer theories, when they did not proceed with Foucault’s genealogical historiography (Halperin 1990), were characterized by a revivification of psychoanalysis from the hasty death Foucault had caused it; but while Butler (1990, 1997), Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990, 2003) and de Lauretis (1999a, 2010) had attempted a mediation between psychoanalytic metapsychology and Foucauldian constructivism, Bersani, instead, used Laplanche’s thought to launch a frontal attack on Foucault’s “liberal activism.” Is the Rectum a Grave? celebrates the value of sex as an act of socially dysfunctional solipsistic enjoyment that isolates the subject from the community: in Bersani’s disquieted ontology, the truly sexual subject, unlike the Foucauldian subject who is subjected to the sexuality apparatus, does not seek social recognition for the self, but instead is aroused by a dissipative drive that leads him or her to humiliation and a devaluation of the self. The celebration of this ascetic homosexuality continues 11 years later in the book Homos, in which Bersani tackles not only Foucault, but the spreading of Foucauldian-inspired queer theories and what he deems the danger of their desexualizing deviations. In his opinion, the upswing of studies on The History of Sexuality during the nineties risks reducing homosexuality to a mere social construct, negating its concrete materiality: as if homosexuals only had in common the homophobia to which they are subjected and there was no homosexual subject to set against the homophobic subject. Queer Nation is not even spared from Bersani’s critiques. He holds Queer Nation guilty of using the term “queer” as a marker of a nonidentity-based political activism, thus depriving the lesbian gay trans movement of its sexual specificity. According to Bersani, queer theories should, instead, interrogate the dysfunctional nature of the sexual (of the death drive) in the process of constructing the individual self, and the queer movement should radically challenge the practices of “liberal” sociality by calling into question the value of sociability itself (Bersani 1996: 73). Knowing himself to be an easy object of critique, Bersani, to protect himself, specifies that his intent is not to preach the return of a stable homosexual identity or carry out a search for gay essence, but to challenge the political correctness of the nineties to show the disturbing character that homosexuality takes on when it does not heroically rise as a champion of tolerance and pluralism, but lies lazily about in an outlawed existence that challenges every social order:

Translation by Julia Heim

You will die child and I shall too. But more beautiful boys than you will still sleep in the sunshine by the seaside. But we shall still be but ourselves.(Sandro Penna, Guardando un ragazzo dormire)