Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory

by Lorenzo Bernini, Julia Heim (Translator)

This book is an attempt to save “the sexual” from the oblivion to which certain strands in queer theory tend to condemn it, and at the same time to limit the risks of anti-politics and solipsism contained in what has been termed antisocial queer theory. It takes a journey from Sigmund Freud to Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem, from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to Teresa de Lauretis, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Tim Dean, and from all of these thinkers back to Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes. At the end, through readings of Bruce LaBruce’s movies on gay zombies, the elitism of antisocial queer theory is brought into contact with popular culture. The living dead come to represent a dispossessed form of subjectivity, whose monstrous drives are counterposed to predatory desires of liberal individuals. The reader is thus lead into the interstitial spaces of the Queer Apocalypses, where the past and the future collapse onto the present, and sexual minorities resurrect to the chance of a non-heroic political agency. 

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction

259 pages, Hardcover

Published December 19, 2016

Reviews

[6655321 · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is something about trying to solve the contradictions of the antisocial queerness in contemporary theory and squaring it with a project of existence that always ends up feeling hollow (whether a turn to the political or the human or a call for greater inhumanity that will bind us together). I like the coverage of Bruce La Bruce and zombies as gay plague quasi citizen quasi other but I don't know how to figure an end that ultimately is and isn't a question of then political framed through ambivalence and metaphor?