Status Updates From Is the Rectum a Grave?: and...

Proustian love anticipates a well-known Lacanian dictum: the object of my desire is not the cause of my desire.

In his seminar on identification, Lacan asks: What is the difference between my dog and the human subject? He answers that his dog never mistakes him for someone else, while misidentification of the other is constitutive of the human.

It is the symptom of a fascination with and terror of the ego-disintegrating jouissance of a fantasized female sexuality—a jouissance available to the male body, according to this fantasy, in “passive” anal sex.

Bersani on Freud: 'At bottom, we are all insatiable and unhappily repressed perverts.'

'All love is, in a sense, homoerotic. Even in the love between a man and a woman, each partner rejoices in finding himself, or herself, in the other.'

Huh?

'It is not only that bisexuality in Freud is nothing more than heterosexuality doubled.'

Oh dear Lord.

'It is doubtful that queer theory will be helpful in this enterprise. The most striking aspect in the evolution of this theory has been a somewhat troubled reflection on the question of sexual identity.'

Oh dear Lord.

Lacanian jouissance unavoidably evokes orgasmic pleasure, but it pushes pleasure beyond itself, to the point of becoming the enemy of pleasure, that which lies “beyond the pleasure principle.”

Foucault, Freud, Barthes, Lacan ... some of these essays have not aged well, to be polite.

“What makes homosexuality ‘disturbing,’” Foucault remarked in a 1981 interview, is “the homosexual mode of life, much more than the sexual act itself.”

At the same time, gay literary studies, for example, is tireless in its pursuit of what is called homoeroticism in an astonishing number of significant writers from the past. We end up with the implicit but no less extraordinary proposition that gays aren’t homosexual but all straights are homoerotic.

'Identity-politics is far from dead. Today the notion of community—and now I’m by no means speaking only of the United State—is supported by, indeed often seems grounded in a terror, at times paranoid, at other times realistic enough, at the loss of an identity conferred by belonging to a community.'

Bersani is dated ... occasionally you refract a comment through our current lens, and get goosebumps.

Only by insisting on the bleakness, the love of power, even the violence perhaps inherent in human relations can we perhaps begin to redesign those relations in ways that will not require the use of culture to ennoble them.

But what if we said, for example, not that it is wrong to think of so-called passive sex as “demeaning,” but rather that the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it? “AIDS,” Watney writes, “offers a new sign for the symbolic machinery of repression, making the rectum a grave”...

The accounts of Professor Narayan and Judge Wallach of gay men having sex twenty to thirty times a night, or once a minute, are much less descriptive of even the most promiscuous male sexuality than they are reminiscent of male fantasies about women’s multiple orgasms.

On the whole, gay men are no less socially ambitious, and, more often than we like to think, no less reactionary and racist than heterosexuals. To want sex with another man is not exactly a credential for political radicalism—a fact both recognized and denied by the gay liberation movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Finally, the story that gave me the greatest morbid delight appeared in the London Sun under the headline “I’d Shoot My Son if He Had AIDS, Says Vicar!” accompanied by a photograph of a man holding a shotgun at a boy at pointblank range.

Bersani is "attempting to re-imagine the subject and and to invent what Foucault called 'new relational modes.'" He "takes Foucault's summoning us to rethink the relational as a political and moral imperative (a precondition to durable social transformations)." Feels very sympathetic to Kaja Silverman's "Flesh of My Flesh."