Abstract
Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” move through the lexicons of recent critical and queer theory, spectrally accompanying rethinkings of time, event, and the past, present, and future.2 States of emergency demand it, as do life inside times of war and states of exception that have become (or were they always?) historical norm.3 At such times critics and theorists look to others who have spoken during states of emergency and tried to teach us. These are the ghosts Jacques Derrida writes about as the paternal and quasi-paternal figures who rise up to warn and admonish and enjoin us, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father or like Abraham’s God, to attend to the way “the time is out of joint” and to assume, as Hamlet calls it, the “cursèd” ethical and political burden of setting it right, to sacrifice ourselves in a “vanishing present” and in the name of a future to come, without knowledge of what setting it right entails for a future we cannot know.4
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Notes
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schoken Books, 1969), 255–58.
See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Page Dubois, Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from Conservatives (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 54–55.
John N. Grant, ed., The Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages III iv 1 to IV ii 100 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
Page Dubois, Sappho is Burning (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Vintage, 2003).
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin, 1984), 76–100.
Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xi-xlviii, 118 n. 21.
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 181.
Past, Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman,” in Linda Nicholson, ed., The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 265–71.
See Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).
Louise Labé, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. François Rigolot (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), 108, ll. 28–32. The translation is mine.
François Rigolot, “Gender vs. Sex Difference in Louise Labé’s Grammar of Love,” in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, ed., Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 287–98, at 290. The translation is his.
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 433–44.
Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, ed. and trans. P.A. Chilton (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1984), story 30, 317–23.
See Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territory, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, ed. and trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; and David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies and Pleasure in Queer Theory,” in Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman, eds., Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 221–30, at 225, 226.
See Freccero, “Practicing Queer Philology with Marguerite de Navarre: Nationalism and the Castigation of Desire,” in Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 107–23. The phrase “apparitional lesbian” is Terry Castle’s.
Laurie Anderson, “The Dream Before.” Strange Angels (Warner Brothers, 1989).
Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 139.
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© 2011 Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, and Diane Watt
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Freccero, C. (2011). The Queer Time of the Lesbian Premodern. In: Giffney, N., Sauer, M.M., Watt, D. (eds) The Lesbian Premodern. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117198_5
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