The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects

by Mari Ruti

In The Ethics of Opting Out, Mari Ruti provides an accessible yet theoretically rigorous account of the ideological divisions that have animated queer theory during the last decade, paying particular attention to the field's rejection of dominant neoliberal narratives of success, cheerfulness, and self-actualization. More specifically, she focuses on queer negativity in the work of Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and Lynne Huffer, and on the rhetoric of bad feelings found in the work of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, David Eng, Heather Love, and José Muñoz. Ruti highlights the ways in which queer theory's desire to opt out of normative society rewrites ethical theory and practice in genuinely innovative ways at the same time as she resists turning antinormativity into a new norm. This wide-ranging and thoughtful book maps the parameters of contemporary queer theory in order to rethink the foundational assumptions of the field.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, LGBT, Theory, Feminism

266 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 7, 2017

About the author

Mari Ruti is Distinguished Professor of critical theory and of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. She is an interdisciplinary scholar within the theoretical humanities working at the intersection of contemporary theory, continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, trauma theory, posthumanist ethics, and gender and sexuality studies.

Reviews

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by one of my mentors whose influence led to my interest in queer theory to begin with. Ruti's Ethics of Opting Out is accessible for those who are newly familiar to the "Antisocial Question in Queer Theory" and the relevant debate regarding Queer Futurity, although having familiarity with the key texts involved in the debate, e.g. Cruising Utopia and No Future, does make it easier to absorb her criticisms and interpretations. Ruti's contribution to this debate, aside from resurrecting it, involves a deconstruction of Lacan's relevancy to the debate beyond Edelman's application and a rereading of both Edelman's and Halberstam's stance. Ruti does an excellent job highlighting the problematic implications of their work, and I find the final section, which is a dialogue on silence Ruti engages with a student of hers, fascinating. I disagree on how she interprets aspects of Muñoz's queer utopianism, but I find her insight valuable.

[Quin Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant, and a must read for any student of queer theory. Ruti deftly summarizes key theorists and debates in contemporary queer theory. She then proceeds to systematically critique and dismantles many of the fields most unhelpful pieties and impasses, such as the antisocial/relational divide and the field's denial of the value of subjectivity, femininity, and normativity. She also takes Edelman to task for his apolitical, white male formalism and Halberstam to task for his misogyny.

I have only a few critiques. First, while Ruti offers her much more capacious and compelling reading of Lacan in contrast to Edelman, she caricatures Judith Butler's work in a dishonest and unhelpful way. This is especially aggravating given that Ruti's Lacan is basically a clunkier, less compelling version of Butler. Everytime Ruti disagrees with Butler, she offers a strange misreading of Butler's work followed by her own favored interpretation of Lacan. Unsurprisingly, each time she invokes Lacan, he seems to be arguing what Butler was actually trying to say, but again in less compelling and overly laden terms.

Second, Ruti ends the body chapters of the book with an appeal to the impersonal universal ethics advocated by Bersani and Dean as a way to overcome what she sets up as the problem of "difference." Instead of going back to boring white men who want to ignore race and gender, she could have drawn on Audre Lorde's Black feminist conception of difference as a dialectic. Given the trajectory of her argument, this would have made more sense and would have been more satisfying both to readers and (I suspect) to Ruti herself, as she herself expresses some disappointment and doubt about her ending place.

Lastly, Ruti appends a "dialogue" between herself and a graduate student about the political value of silence to the end of the book. This is by far the least interesting and most unhelpful part of the text. It reads as filler, and may have been added to pad out the page count. It could and should have been done away with altogether.

This book is a necessary read is you find queer theory's antipathy to feminism, identity politics, normative judgments, and subjectivity to be infuriating and stymying, as do I. An excellent and much needed book, despite its flaws.

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruti's book is an epic piece of scholarship.
Giving her Lacanian perspective, in the midst of Queer's Theory's Defiant Subjects, she lines out several different takes, from Butler, Foucault, Edelman, Dean, Berlant - while basically suggesting how her Lacanian perspective may be helpful to think about queer abjection; alienation; and choosing to 'opt-out'.
Lots of highlights and bookmarks, and for me in particular, I really like Ruti's interpretation of Das Ding, and it makes me want to see how Lacan distinguishes it actually for the master signifier... I am thinking on an off the hand comment, the master signifier is our mask, whereas the objet a is what we seek in the other to basically make our mask fit.
Weird conclusion however, but, I do wonder what it means to be 'silent' as a subject thrown into language. I think silence is sometimes powerful, and other times a symptom.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruti's dense book is deeply embedded in queer theory and how it is informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, however she raises important issues for anyone interested in larger questions about how queer theory operates.

"This is why, despite appearances, neoliberal capitalism thrives on the perpetuation of lack-frequently experienced as a vague anxiety about losing what you already have-more than on the generation of excess even as its excesses threaten to drown us in waste." 3

"Historically, the antirelational strand of queer theory has been promoted by white gay men interested in the subversive potential of radical negativity, particularly the connection between jouissance and self-undoing, whereas the relational strand has been promoted by "the rest of us," by those who have been interested in the complex entanglements of sexuality with class, race, gender, nationality, and other collective identity markers." 4

"From a queer theoretical perspective, gays and lesbians who hang their political hopes on marriage rights are caught up in the tentacles of what Lauren Berlin (2011) calls "cruel optimism," hoping against hope that the heteronormative, patriarchal, and state-controlled institution of marriage will somehow make up for the legacies of gay and lesbian abjection." 16

"Foucault (1978-1979) also views marriage as a bio political mechanism that allows social power to penetrate the most intimate corners of our being. Most people in our society believe that their decision to marry is a "choice." But from a bio political perspective, it is a means of disciplining the unruliness of desire, of producing a population that acts in a relatively predictable, relatively responsible manner." 22

"As social critics have long argued, desire in its unshackled form-eros as the kind of drive that resists collective control-is one of the most anti normative forces under the sun. To put the matter bluntly, this type of desire is not in the least bit interested in the viability of the cultural order." 23

"My third example of the ethics of opting out is taken from Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages, which suggests that suicide bombing (terrorism) "is a modality of expression and communication for the subaltern" (2007, 218). Drawing on Gayatri Spivak's claim that "suicide resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through" (quoted in Puar 2007, 218) Puar argues that suicide bombing is a way for the subaltern, denied all other avenues of expression, to speak." 29

"At the same time, there seems to be no way around the fact that every attempt to subvert norms presupposes the very norms it seeks to undermine, so that, for example, every reiteration of femininity on some level falls back on stereotypical notions of femininity. This is why the Butlerian performative subject is caught in an endless loop of collaborating with power." 41

"This is one reason that...I am not entirely convinced by queer theoretical attempts to view sexuality as intrinsically rebellious. I think that, like desire, it has the potential to be rebellious but that, like desire, it can be made to serve the performative principle. In other words...in present-day Western societies, sex-including sex that used to be considered "perverse"-is more often a way to facilitate our capacity to successfully participate in the neoliberal game of keeping up with the multitude of psychic, emotional, and work-related pressures." 63

"There is, then, an irredeemable gab between the Thing as the (non) object that causes our desire on the one hand and the objects (objets a) that our desire seeks out on the other, which is why we are never entirely satisfied...In this context, it is helpful to recall that the Lacanian Thing replicates the dichotomous nature of the Kantian sublime object as one that elicits both awe and terror. As much as we want the Thing, coming too close to it is terrifying for the simple reason that we are constitutionally not designed to endure unmediated jouissance (except, perhaps, in fleeting orgasmic moments); actually possessing the Thing would instantly overload us with jouissance to the extent that we would cease to be (symbolic) subjects." 73

"Simply put, Lacan implies that some objects satisfy us more than others because they seem to contain an echo of the Thing, a tiny sliver of the Thing's sublimity, with the result that they offer us manageable bits of jouissance." 74

"Orgasmic jouissance, in short, neutralizes intersubjective capacity: the drive is an antirational force because...it shuns all objects." 105

"Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing...Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world." Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 169

"As Cvetkovich (2003), among others, has noted, much of the historical archive of queer lives relies on ephemera: passing impressions that have produced no enduring record or that have merely produced scraps of a record that cannot easily be reconstructed into a coherent whole; in part because of the relentless criminalization of queer lives, these lives have eluded the tentacles of "official" history, persisting instead in furtive modalities that defy detection even as they invite it from those "in the know." Munoz is getting at something similar, except that his emphasis lies in the sudden illumination, the sudden revelation, that a tiny sliver of experience floating up from the past can provide. Munoz specifies that queer energies and lives are laid bare "through small gestures, particular intonations and other ephemeral traces" that are "utterly legible to an optic of feeling, a queer optic that permits us to take in the queerness that is embedded in gesture" (2009, 72)...Munoz finds such lingering residues, among other object, in Tony Just's photographs of public men's toilets in New York City." 173

[Nat Baldino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although not so tactfully written, very much appreciate her ability to make a sweep of a field formation seem fresh, not a litany. Agreed with her on Edelman v. butler and she opened my eyes to Lacan until her last chapter, which was eye-rolling, but did lead into a very original approach about impersonal universalist ethics that left me wishing she'd followed that line of argument more. Would be a great book to teach upper level undergraduates or graduate students in QT

[Mills College Library]

306.7601 R977 2017

[Colin Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mari Ruti begins The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subject with the following point about objects: “I am more interested in the kind of pleasure that we obtain from objects we find compelling, proposing that whether or not we actually attain such objects is less important than their capacity to mesmerize us” (8). Ruti unpacks and explores this notion in Chapter 3 (by my estimation, the book’s best and most significant chapter) when she offers a challenge to Todd McGowan’s understanding of two central Lacanian concepts: the object cause desire and the object of desire. For Lacan, the object cause desire is a non-object, a profound nothingness the subject creates in response to the lack inaugurated by the Symbolic structure, or as Žižek describes it, “a hole at the center of the symbolic order.” The Symbolic structure convinces the subject that a moment in time existed before and beyond lack, and the reclaiming of the object cause desire would return the subject to this lost moment of presumed sustained plenitude. But again, this cannot happen because the object cause desire is fiction.

Lacan’s object of desire is a way for the subject to channel this impulse to find its lost object (i.e., the object cause desire). That is to say, the subject mistakes particular objects of desire for the object cause desire. For someone like McGowan, this is what renders capitalism such a seductive but dissatisfying psychic force. Each newfangled consumer good promises more than it can ever deliver. These consumer goods are objects of desire, masquerading as the object cause desire. Therefore, once the subject realizes a particular object of desire cannot eliminate lack, it loses its power and vitality. Regarding this point, McGowan writes, "Capitalism has the effect of sustaining subjects in a constant state of desire...capitalist subjects experience satisfaction itself as dissatisfying, which enables them to simultaneously enjoy themselves and believe wholeheartedly that a more complete satisfaction exists just around the corner, embodied in the newest commodity" (11).

Ruti, by contrast, rejects the idea that investments in objects of desire are exercises in “enjoying ‘nothing’” (112). She writes, “There is room for a degree of ‘rebirth’ in the sense that each new cycle of the repetition compulsion repeats slightly differently—draws new elements, new debris of life, into the groove of the compulsion—so that even when the repetition is largely predictable, it is always also somewhat unpredictable; to the extent that something new is added to the repetition compulsion with every new enactment, one can still speak of a ‘fresh start’ of sorts” (112-113). Essentially, Ruti champions the idea that pursuing objects of desire has something of substance to offer the subject. Instead of imagining the subject’s repetition compulsion as a static psychic structure, Ruti suggests the repetition compulsion is, in a sense, a living, adaptable aspect of the subject’s relationship to lack. In short, pursuing particular objects of desire has something to teach the subject. Ruti writes, “The lack of complete satisfaction does not mean that there is no satisfaction to be had. If anything, the intrinsic impossibility of complete satisfaction is what sustains us as creatures of becoming and what allows us, over and again, to take up the inexhaustible process of producing meaning, including the process of signifying beauty” (114). Ruti acknowledges the rudimentary Lacanian principle that “Any fleeting state of positivity that we may be able to attain must always in the end dissolve back into negativity” (114). In short, “Any attempt to erase lack produces new instances of lack” (114). Yet, Ruti rejects the totalizing negativity associated with McGowan's theorizing of desire. Yes, desire inevitably leads to negativity, but that does not mean desire has nothing to offer the subject. Desire is creation, not the passive, fleeting consumption of misunderstood objects. For Ruti, the pursuit of these objects demonstrates “our ability to create our object—rather than randomly discover[ing] it in the world” (115). Furthermore, “Even though the signifier (language) partakes in constraining collective regimes, it is never fully oppressive but remains open to various types of inventive reconfiguration” (115). The signifier has the capacity to function as a catalyst for the imagination, which is to say, “The signifier is not a monolithic monster that unilaterally imposes its hegemonic law on our psychic lives” (118). Perhaps one could argue the signifier is the limit that makes things possible.

For this review, I have focused my attention on Chapter 3, but the rest of The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subject is undoubtedly worth anyone’s time for the reasons that all of Mari Ruti’s books are worth someone’s time. She writes clearly, convincingly, and persuasively about concepts that are, in the wrong hands, devilishly hard to understand.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ruti can often reduce philosophical figures into positional tropes (and there is some of that here, especially in setting up dichotomies: queer negativity vs. queer futurity, etc.), but overall it manages to get into the weeds while providing a good survey of the Edelman-Muñoz debate. Some of it remains baffling though: the critique of the sovereign Enlightenment subject is somehow taken as endorsing the destruction of the subjectivity of oppressed minorities, instead of as an interpretive suggestion.

[Brenden O'Donnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Contains some helpful summary chapters of difficult queer theory for those who might be unfamiliar with the field. The argument is at best redundant — an outsider coming in to queer theory trying to make a claim about whether queer theorist x’s arguments are politically poignant when in fact that’s all that queer theorists ever talk about.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mari Ruti is the clearest theorist and synthesizer ever. So good. I’m leaving with a grasp of the Lacan and Zizek vs Foucault and Butler divide, the social and anti social divide in Queer Theory, and why Edelman is a flop. All while promoting a radical positivity and ethical code in spite of (because of?) deconstruction! Truly brilliant I ordered her other books.

[Isidora Stanković · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.7 I love Mari Ruti’s Lacan. I loved him through her many books and I love him here. I love how she weaves through different theorists and I love her humor that shines through even in such an academic text. It’s a very important theory book and not dry at all. I really enjoyed it.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I Love how the author obfuscates
Queer Theory into a total Mind Bind
of pure elitism to a pointlessness of irrelevancy--
of what queerness could translate into present day Society
and being Queer--

[leren_lezen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mari Ruti will always be my ultimate critical theory/Lacanian crush <3