There is no calculus of the terror that can make a proper calculation without reference to that which resists it.
— Fred Moten, 2017
The most complicated gamble on tomorrow and thereafter — writing.
— Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
Listening to Valentin Radutiu’s haunting performance of Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, Sz. 68: No. 4. Buciumeana (Dance from Bucsum) and thinking about how queer temporalities make space for hauntology, where hauntology remains hope-full, or rich with possibility for encountering alterity and thereby confronting “the world of the fathers” than obsessed Critical Theorists in the prior century.
On that note, a few scrambled gatherings from notebooks this week—
“AS USUAL, I’LL BE LATE”
“Lunch”
Even the morning dreams of it
Bent over those torn envelopes or steaming
Papers those Cubist towers
Of paper clips and pink erasures
We think we understand so much but nobody
Ever mentions the secrets of lunch
We plan to meet in some cafe
As the sunlight pours off the buildings
Onto the striped canopies the umbrellas above
The white tables
As usual I’ll be late
Stopping on the way to look at books or scarves
Wondering how you’ll tell me
Finally to go screw myself once and for all
The secretaries leaving their martinis
The executives phoning in from God-knows-where
I even knew a man who ate lunch
In typewriter stores driving all the clerks mad
Leaving cigarettes burning on the display desks
Rye seeds in the immaculately polished keys
Even poems in the carriage
So here we are again bent over
Those inscribed tablets those endless commandments
Of the menu
Where the choice of wine is blood
James Joyce once said or clear electricity
David Saint John
*
FREUD AND THE FATHERS
The world of the fathers is deeply embedded in Freudian psychoanalysis, as Jamieson Webster notes in his essay, “Pulling Rank: The Sins of Freud’s Exiled Son,” one of the many gems in the issue of Parapraxis dedicated to “resistance.” Otto Rank got booted from psychoanalytic circles for challenging the primacy of Freud’s paterfamilias.
“TELEOLOGIES OF LIVING”
Elizabeth Freeman’s “erotohistoriography” of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein made it impossible for me to concentrate on anything else for the duration the day when I encountered it. I am still beholden to — and energized by — her claim than Time Binds would not offer a projective logic for future policy but instead would remain queerly resistant to programmatic urges and focus on the risk of “writing.” In Freeman’s words, “to write after all is only to hazard the possibility that there will be a future of some sort.”
What Freeman calls the emergent “teleologies of living” that structure the logic of people, family, nation, and group identity rely on this notion of inheritance, which becomes not just a word for the economic passing-along of social and economic status but also “the familial and collective legacy from which a group will draw a properly political future.”
AGAINST MARCHES: AN ARGUMENT FOR THE DANCE OF HISTORY
Derrida’s reading of Marx as theorizing a responsibility to honor the Other across time puts friendship at the center of the cosmos. The dead also call us back to this when we get too obsessed with the march of history. And how awful that history should be militarized in this way, armed with the metaphoric motion of the march rather than the dance. Marches are remorseless and mechanized; dances constellate and make use of the field in spirals and repetitions. The march is fundamentally restrictive and coercive: it only exists in relation to the beat of boot-steps. Imagine the sound of barefoot marches and what you hear is immediately is carceral: the marches of Palestinians being forced to flee their homes, the footsteps of children in Nazi concentration camps, the agony of forced migrations and terror. Time cannot heal the division between the hauntological and the notion of Progress that seeks to hide the bones of its graves.
Isn’t Buciumeana a motion that takes up time?
Isn’t the dance a way of figuring how motion is influenced by its local and immediate surroundings (i.e. music)?
The march limits how we see and read history; it ignores what creates the possibility for collective action and solidarity on the ground; autonomous Marxists and anarchists have long insisted on this non-hierarchical understanding of direct action and radical possibility.
SPEAKING OF DADDY-TIME
There is a temporal aspect to Freud’s view of sexual perversion, as when he defines pleasure as a type of “loitering at the way-station toward the male orgasm.”
SPEAKING OF EROS
. . . it tends to smash time. Unlike longing and desire which proceed from imagining a lack, the erotic “traffics less in belief than in encounter, less in damaged wholes than in intersections of body parts, less in loss than in novel possibility,” writes Freeman. And I think this is generally true, though I would contest Freeman’s emphasis on physicality here, since eros is uninhibited and human bodies remain structures of inhibition and limitation. Leo Bersani argued that sexual relations could not play the role of restoring wholeness, or providing a restorative justice. Instead, his idea of erotic “self-shattering” focuses on the organic rupture of continuity between “selves.” Perhaps most notably, self-shattering also speaks to the humiliation of vulnerability: of being available to be touched, felt, imagined.
“ANEW” AS A DIRECTION AND MOTION
I palpate you as a violin palpates the silk of the faraway time
and around me and you sprouts the grass of an ancient place—anew
— Mahmoud Darwish, “Sonnet V” (translated by Fady Joudah)