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Baedan 1: Journal of Queer Nihilism
From the Journal:
“If we can determine anything from our project of queer negativity, it is that capitalism has an unlimited capacity to tolerate and recuperate any alternative politics or artistic expression we could imagine. It is not a political negativity that we must locate in our queerness, but rather a vicious anti-politics which opposes any utopian dreams of a better future residing on the far side of a lifetime of sacrifice. Our queer negativity has nothing to do with art, but it has a great deal to do with urban insurrection, piracy, slave revolt: all those bodily struggles that refuse the future and pursue the irrationality of jouissance, enjoyment, rage, chaos. Ours is not the struggle for an alternative, because there is no alternative which can escape the ever-expanding horizons of capital. Instead we fight, hopeless, to tear our lives away from that expanding horizon and to erupt with wild enjoyment now. Anything less is our continued domestication to the rule of civilization.”
“If we can determine anything from our project of queer negativity, it is that capitalism has an unlimited capacity to tolerate and recuperate any alternative politics or artistic expression we could imagine. It is not a political negativity that we must locate in our queerness, but rather a vicious anti-politics which opposes any utopian dreams of a better future residing on the far side of a lifetime of sacrifice. Our queer negativity has nothing to do with art, but it has a great deal to do with urban insurrection, piracy, slave revolt: all those bodily struggles that refuse the future and pursue the irrationality of jouissance, enjoyment, rage, chaos. Ours is not the struggle for an alternative, because there is no alternative which can escape the ever-expanding horizons of capital. Instead we fight, hopeless, to tear our lives away from that expanding horizon and to erupt with wild enjoyment now. Anything less is our continued domestication to the rule of civilization.”
186 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 23, 2021
The concept of futurity, and what children represent, will totally stick with me. really clarifying analysis of a specific example of how vulnerabilities get manufactured and/or used in opportunistic ways. so good.
August 7, 2023
I really loved this journal!! The essays are great, analyzing the concepts of history, the relationship to time (past, present and future) and to the child, civilization, negativity, action and so on. Baedan includes texts by Edelman, Benjamin and Camatte in their reflections.
"The symbolic deployment of queerness by the social order is always an attempt to identify the negativity of the death drive, to lock this chaotic potential up in the confines of this or that subjectivity.
Foucault’s work is foundational to queer theory in part because of his argument that power must create and then classify antagonistic subjectivities so as to then annihilate any subversive potential within a social body. Homosexuals, gangsters, criminals, immigrants, welfare mothers, transsexuals, women, youth, terrorists, the black bloc, communists, extremists: power is always constructing and defining these antagonistic subjects which must be managed. When the smoke clears after a riot, the state and media apparatuses universally begin to locate such events within the logic of identity, freezing the fluidity of revolt into a handful of subject positions to be imprisoned, or, more sinisterly, organized.
Progressivism, with its drive toward inclusion and assimilation, stakes its hope on the social viability of these subjects, on their ability to participate in the daily reproduction of society. In doing so, the ideology of progress functions to trap subversive potential within a particular subject, and then to solicit that subject’s self-repudiation of the danger which they’ve been constructed to represent. This move for social peace fails to eliminate the drive, because despite a whole range of determinisms, there is no subject which can solely and perfectly contain the potential for revolt. The simultaneous attempt at justice must also fail, because the integration of each successive subject position into normative relations necessitates the construction of the next Other to be disciplined or destroyed.
A non-identitarian, unrepresentable, unintelligible queer revolt will be purely negative, or it won’t be at all. In the same way, an insurrectionary anarchy must embrace the death drive against all the positivisms afforded by the world it opposes. If we hope to interrupt the ceaseless forward motion of capital and its state, we cannot rely on failed methods.
Identity politics, platforms, formal organizations, subcultures, activist campaigns (each being either queer or anarchist) will always arrive at the dead ends of identity and representation. We must flee from these positivities, these models, to instead experiment with the undying negativity of the death drive.
an insurrectionary process can only be an explosion of negativity against everything that dominates and exploits us, but also against everything that produces us as we are.
One side of this debate circulates a “angelic” picture of his face to assure society of his child-like nature. The other side circulates a doctored picture of him wearing a grill as a kind of racialized testament to his adultness. Each side feverishly examines the ‘evidence’ to argue whether or not he had attacked his murderer before he died. What’s at stake in this debate is Trayvon’s symbolic position as the Child: if he represents the Child, his murder is the atrocious destruction of his future (and by extensions everyone’s). If he is not the Child, then his killer acted out of the need to protect the future of his own community (and the children within it) from a perceived (even if falsely) threat. While politicians as high-ranking as the President invest Trayvon with the burden of carrying the futurity of their own children, others continue to assert their second amendment right to own weapons so they may protect theirs.
This unstated option, the one laid out by Camatte and in a different way by Edelman, is that intensity of living which would break our domestication and end our investment in civilization’s future. This intensity of enjoyment (the literal translation of jouissance from the French) must be the same jouissance which shatters our subjective enslavement to capitalist civilization. It is that exact current which permeates all of society and delivers to the necessity of insurrection against all that exists and for a joy which we cannot name.
This jouissance is the resistance which is hidden by, and yet integral to every social structure. Within the spectacles of the anti-austerity demonstrations and the plaza occupations lies the unnameable remainder which does not promise a better future. It is the unassimilable and ineffable tendency for people to self-sabotage any efforts at political organization. It is the darkness so feared by the right and so denied by the left. It is what the police must be called on to repress and the organizer to assimilate.
The homosexual can only be a degenerate, for he does not generate—he is only the artistic end to a species….
Schizoanalysis provides the alternative: the schizophrenic is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process is the potential of revolution, and only in the activity of autonomous, spontaneous groupings, outside the social order, can revolution be achieved. The result, which is central to Hocquenghem’s project, is a worship of the excluded and marginal as the real material of social transformation.
the undoing of civilization must be linked to a movement based in the uncontrollability of desire.
Starting from a critique of civilization, we can understand this self-domination as a result of our domestication into subjects. Locating language and symbolic thought as engines of this domestication then as a consequence, our very capacity to think has been colonized from birth onward through this process. As such, we must turn to those forms of struggle which are not justified by Reason.
We must turn to that ineffable jouissance as a tool in combat against domestication. Let’s turn again to the critique of domestication so that we might employ their help in elaborating how we might break the forward motion of capitalist time.
Camatte holds that “historical materialism is a glorification of the wandering in which humanity has been engaged for more than a century.” For Camatte, any ideology which argues for the “growth of productive forces as the condition sine qua non for liberation” is an aimless wandering away from the primitive anarchy which is destroyed by capital’s hegemony.
In other words, the past is present and everywhere, touching us every moment and “in the voices we hear,” but only suggestively, in and in spite of our own inability to recognize it
This system exists to erase memories, to evict us from our childhood homes, to incarcerate our loved ones, to execute the fathers of children too young to fully understand what happened. Our struggle has been an effort to create memories that they can never take from us. Running toward the sunset, we have found that the horizon only moves farther away. We awake every morning to the same cycle of death and power that we escaped in our dreams the night before. Yet we continue to trudge to the ends of the earth, we continue to fight. It is when the air is still, when all seems quiet, that we are planning our next move.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule."
"The symbolic deployment of queerness by the social order is always an attempt to identify the negativity of the death drive, to lock this chaotic potential up in the confines of this or that subjectivity.
Foucault’s work is foundational to queer theory in part because of his argument that power must create and then classify antagonistic subjectivities so as to then annihilate any subversive potential within a social body. Homosexuals, gangsters, criminals, immigrants, welfare mothers, transsexuals, women, youth, terrorists, the black bloc, communists, extremists: power is always constructing and defining these antagonistic subjects which must be managed. When the smoke clears after a riot, the state and media apparatuses universally begin to locate such events within the logic of identity, freezing the fluidity of revolt into a handful of subject positions to be imprisoned, or, more sinisterly, organized.
Progressivism, with its drive toward inclusion and assimilation, stakes its hope on the social viability of these subjects, on their ability to participate in the daily reproduction of society. In doing so, the ideology of progress functions to trap subversive potential within a particular subject, and then to solicit that subject’s self-repudiation of the danger which they’ve been constructed to represent. This move for social peace fails to eliminate the drive, because despite a whole range of determinisms, there is no subject which can solely and perfectly contain the potential for revolt. The simultaneous attempt at justice must also fail, because the integration of each successive subject position into normative relations necessitates the construction of the next Other to be disciplined or destroyed.
A non-identitarian, unrepresentable, unintelligible queer revolt will be purely negative, or it won’t be at all. In the same way, an insurrectionary anarchy must embrace the death drive against all the positivisms afforded by the world it opposes. If we hope to interrupt the ceaseless forward motion of capital and its state, we cannot rely on failed methods.
Identity politics, platforms, formal organizations, subcultures, activist campaigns (each being either queer or anarchist) will always arrive at the dead ends of identity and representation. We must flee from these positivities, these models, to instead experiment with the undying negativity of the death drive.
an insurrectionary process can only be an explosion of negativity against everything that dominates and exploits us, but also against everything that produces us as we are.
One side of this debate circulates a “angelic” picture of his face to assure society of his child-like nature. The other side circulates a doctored picture of him wearing a grill as a kind of racialized testament to his adultness. Each side feverishly examines the ‘evidence’ to argue whether or not he had attacked his murderer before he died. What’s at stake in this debate is Trayvon’s symbolic position as the Child: if he represents the Child, his murder is the atrocious destruction of his future (and by extensions everyone’s). If he is not the Child, then his killer acted out of the need to protect the future of his own community (and the children within it) from a perceived (even if falsely) threat. While politicians as high-ranking as the President invest Trayvon with the burden of carrying the futurity of their own children, others continue to assert their second amendment right to own weapons so they may protect theirs.
This unstated option, the one laid out by Camatte and in a different way by Edelman, is that intensity of living which would break our domestication and end our investment in civilization’s future. This intensity of enjoyment (the literal translation of jouissance from the French) must be the same jouissance which shatters our subjective enslavement to capitalist civilization. It is that exact current which permeates all of society and delivers to the necessity of insurrection against all that exists and for a joy which we cannot name.
This jouissance is the resistance which is hidden by, and yet integral to every social structure. Within the spectacles of the anti-austerity demonstrations and the plaza occupations lies the unnameable remainder which does not promise a better future. It is the unassimilable and ineffable tendency for people to self-sabotage any efforts at political organization. It is the darkness so feared by the right and so denied by the left. It is what the police must be called on to repress and the organizer to assimilate.
The homosexual can only be a degenerate, for he does not generate—he is only the artistic end to a species….
Schizoanalysis provides the alternative: the schizophrenic is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process is the potential of revolution, and only in the activity of autonomous, spontaneous groupings, outside the social order, can revolution be achieved. The result, which is central to Hocquenghem’s project, is a worship of the excluded and marginal as the real material of social transformation.
the undoing of civilization must be linked to a movement based in the uncontrollability of desire.
Starting from a critique of civilization, we can understand this self-domination as a result of our domestication into subjects. Locating language and symbolic thought as engines of this domestication then as a consequence, our very capacity to think has been colonized from birth onward through this process. As such, we must turn to those forms of struggle which are not justified by Reason.
We must turn to that ineffable jouissance as a tool in combat against domestication. Let’s turn again to the critique of domestication so that we might employ their help in elaborating how we might break the forward motion of capitalist time.
Camatte holds that “historical materialism is a glorification of the wandering in which humanity has been engaged for more than a century.” For Camatte, any ideology which argues for the “growth of productive forces as the condition sine qua non for liberation” is an aimless wandering away from the primitive anarchy which is destroyed by capital’s hegemony.
In other words, the past is present and everywhere, touching us every moment and “in the voices we hear,” but only suggestively, in and in spite of our own inability to recognize it
This system exists to erase memories, to evict us from our childhood homes, to incarcerate our loved ones, to execute the fathers of children too young to fully understand what happened. Our struggle has been an effort to create memories that they can never take from us. Running toward the sunset, we have found that the horizon only moves farther away. We awake every morning to the same cycle of death and power that we escaped in our dreams the night before. Yet we continue to trudge to the ends of the earth, we continue to fight. It is when the air is still, when all seems quiet, that we are planning our next move.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule."
March 18, 2015
the first hundred pages r good
August 22, 2018
"when will be able to shatter the power of words by the movement of our skins?"
There are moments where this collection of words truly spoke to me: the fallibility of language, the domestication of all life by capital. Are we all dead, and is a new human being waiting to emerge from our corpses?
There are moments where I've learned things, but that's probably not the best relationship to have with this book: the embrace of pure negativity, being against society and all politics. Perhaps we should all live in the present and give up all hope in the future.
And finally, there are moments. LIKE WHAT THE HECK I DON'T UNDERSTAND TIME AT ALL. But maybe I'll understand it one day.
why don't we fear death?
There are moments where this collection of words truly spoke to me: the fallibility of language, the domestication of all life by capital. Are we all dead, and is a new human being waiting to emerge from our corpses?
There are moments where I've learned things, but that's probably not the best relationship to have with this book: the embrace of pure negativity, being against society and all politics. Perhaps we should all live in the present and give up all hope in the future.
And finally, there are moments. LIKE WHAT THE HECK I DON'T UNDERSTAND TIME AT ALL. But maybe I'll understand it one day.
why don't we fear death?
May 23, 2021
This is the only issue of the journal baedan that i read pretty closely, i'm sure the other ones are amazing too, but this one would be a hard act to follow. the discussion on lee edelman's thoughts on futurity was one of those moments when a reader is given words and framework for something that has been bothering them (ok, me! ;) ) for ages, only has never gotten enough attention or clarity. it was awesome and regardless of whether i like edelman as a person (i'm sure i would not, on general principles), baedan's treatment of his ideas on children as a heavily loaded metaphor that echoes the not-in-this-world bias of christianity, and maintains our preoccupation with whatever-is-not-going-on-in-front-of-us, was life changing for me.
April 26, 2023
Against The Gendered Nightmare is the only piece from it I remember. While seemingly proclamatory and dogmatic at times, falling on era tropes like post-civilization, was critically informative of my undergraduate theses - I hope that's amusing. ATGN did not change my life, but it did send the groundwork for my structural understanding of the world - something direly needed when, at 20, visceral distaste for crimethinc after Work, which was frankly transphobic. This work was important to me because of how it went hand-in-hand with my clinging to a particular in-group of super-online 4chan expat tumblr posties. IYKYK to the one person who knows who I'm talking about.
The most memorable part, to me, was the thesis about history - echoed in anthropology - about myths actually serving as a meaningful point of data on the historical record. What's more, the work proclaims to dismiss Marx and Historical Materialism, which is admirable even if one would not go that far, ATGN is actually an intelligent work of materialism. Compare with Lies Journal.
if you are a theorycel and the phrase "be gay do crime" appeals to you, baeden is probably the best thing you'll find out of post-leftism. I've heard this builds on Wittig, and inspired Gender Nihilism, but this seems most directly connected to Against His-story, Against Leviathan - citing it throughout, and offering revisions deemed crucial. I am not certain what exactly was in baedan 1 vs 2, but if this contains the thesis about the child i also wish to echo my sentiment in baedan 2, even if this work is probably better than No Future.
Semiotics aside, the prose also does not disappoint. baedan is bold, its words erupting in beautiful flame, etched into ephemeral history - alongside theoretical depth, it also has the slogans.
The most memorable part, to me, was the thesis about history - echoed in anthropology - about myths actually serving as a meaningful point of data on the historical record. What's more, the work proclaims to dismiss Marx and Historical Materialism, which is admirable even if one would not go that far, ATGN is actually an intelligent work of materialism. Compare with Lies Journal.
if you are a theorycel and the phrase "be gay do crime" appeals to you, baeden is probably the best thing you'll find out of post-leftism. I've heard this builds on Wittig, and inspired Gender Nihilism, but this seems most directly connected to Against His-story, Against Leviathan - citing it throughout, and offering revisions deemed crucial. I am not certain what exactly was in baedan 1 vs 2, but if this contains the thesis about the child i also wish to echo my sentiment in baedan 2, even if this work is probably better than No Future.
Semiotics aside, the prose also does not disappoint. baedan is bold, its words erupting in beautiful flame, etched into ephemeral history - alongside theoretical depth, it also has the slogans.
September 5, 2021
Really loved this journal, and this stood out as my favourite release from the Baedan crew. The first essay was great, tracing a line through concepts of history, negativity, and action that helped refine, for me, a conception of queerness beyond just an embracing of difference or uniqueness within society or even just within the LGBT umbrella. It felt like a really nice departure from other anti-assimilationist queer politics which seem more posi, yet the major substance of their critique is just being different than a mainstream gay and lesbian agenda.
Drawing lines between Lee Edelman, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Camatte, Baedan places keenly in their sights the idea of the future (be it idea of the child, utopia, or a greater civilization). From this, they try to strip apart how living for -- and acting for -- the future is a political framework that can disempower us and limit how we respond to the oppression of capitalism and the state today.
The other essays and proses were interesting but felt heady and didn't bring as many thoughts to mind to share but I encourage readers to pick up the text if your interested in the politics of anti-assimilationist queers, nihilism or anarchism.
Drawing lines between Lee Edelman, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Camatte, Baedan places keenly in their sights the idea of the future (be it idea of the child, utopia, or a greater civilization). From this, they try to strip apart how living for -- and acting for -- the future is a political framework that can disempower us and limit how we respond to the oppression of capitalism and the state today.
The other essays and proses were interesting but felt heady and didn't bring as many thoughts to mind to share but I encourage readers to pick up the text if your interested in the politics of anti-assimilationist queers, nihilism or anarchism.
November 18, 2020
This helps to put this whole year in perspective, not in the sense that it was an anomaly, but precisely because it was another brick in a crumbling tower of sustainability and infrastructure. If that sounds horrible and hopeless, there's actually a reason to see this as an opportunity to live proudly. As this book states in the first few pages:
"our task is infinite, not because we have so much to build but because we have an entire world to destroy"
"our task is infinite, not because we have so much to build but because we have an entire world to destroy"
August 22, 2020
Extremely quotable and cathartic. Inconsistently absorbing. Would happily attend a dramatised reading of the book. Disappointingly often a masculine understanding of queer, though I recognise that the state infrastructure the book addresses is masculinist too.
September 8, 2019
At times rambling and unconvincing, but never uninteresting.
November 14, 2023
This took me a long time to finish. I skipped around to give myself a break from some of the density. It made me feel less alone. It impressed my crush, although they turned out to be unreliable.
June 9, 2019
Part 1 is absolutely worth reading, especially for its summation of anarchism as a negative project and its discussion on futurism as an ideology particularly regarding the Child. I'm not sold on jouissance as a revolutionary force though, largely because I don't see how the sex and violence described differ from the sex and violence men particularly engage in any way (I actually kept thinking of the proto-fascists in Male Fantasies every time it was mentioned because the distinction between revolutionary violence and any other kind wasn't actually made, and the ideological difference doesn't fit with the argument made). Further, I don't know that women experience what is posited here as universal jouissance, since our experience of sex and violence tends to be very mundane. Read it for part one though
July 7, 2015
Complete and utter bullshit, and I just wasted an entire day reading this. Capitalism forbids thinking of any future beyond its limits, and is actually incapable of thinking beyond the future. Really, this is just an acceptance of the very limits of capitalism which masquerade as the end of history. Good on the authors for imagining that an acceptance of capitalist logic is somehow anti-capitalism. Completely confused, first world academic eclecticism.
February 16, 2013
I was a little underwhelmed with the overall conclusions but the authors manage to draw interesting lines between insurrectionary/ anti-political thought and queer theory and their various influences: Edelman, Guy Hocquenghem, Camatte, Butler, etc.
Probably only interesting if you're already thinking about this stuff but a totally worthy critique of the weaknesses of Lee Edelman's No Future.
Probably only interesting if you're already thinking about this stuff but a totally worthy critique of the weaknesses of Lee Edelman's No Future.
July 3, 2015
Love the proof in the end
May 2, 2016
Not particularly good. The last chapter was enjoyable though.
July 20, 2016
A really interesting read. Being familiar with the source material is helpful but not mandatory.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews