The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS

The Body of This Death HI STORICITY AND SOCI ALlTY IN THE TIME OF AIDS

WILLIAM HAVER

STANfORD UN1VERS!TY PRESS

Stll nford, California

Ac'1lod-~9

Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from comments from a number of people whom I am grateful to know as colleagues; even more has it benefited from discussions, differences, arguments, brawls, and even occasional agreements, with those same colleagues. I am particularly indebted for their support and colloquy to Bat-Ami Bar On, Judith Butler, John Chaffee, Brett de Bary, Marilyn Desmond, Paul Dottin, Sarah Elbert, Risa Faussette, James Fujii, Yukiko Hanawa, Gladys Jimenez-Munoz, Gerald Kadish, J. Victor Koschmann, Maria Lugones, Alice Pitt, Ellen Radovic, Katherine Rudolph, Kelvin Santiago-Valles, Joan Scott, Israel Silva-Merced, Joseph Suglia, and Maureen Turim. Cat Lam has been most helpful in her enthusiastic searches for materials on DavidWojnarowicz; Ron Palmer's prose poems, in their unrepentant queer eroticism as well as in their formal virtuosity, heartened me at a critical juncture; Stephen Barber has courageously responded to my work from the only place where a judgment has any consequence whatsoever; Sue Golding, in her existential comportment, as in her work, has been nothing less than something like an inspiration; Michael Bresalier made writing on Wojnarowicz and Golding a difficult and painful process, for which I am sometimes grateful. Naoki Sakai and I have been talking,

~

.d

VUl

Acknowledgments

drinking, and arguing for years; in the instance of the present essay, I am especially indebted to him for discussions of Nishida, Ota, and Tanizaki-and so I hereby forgive him for accusing me of Lacanianism. I thank Gary Wickham, erstwhile intellectual companion and lesbian-brother-in-residence, for doing all the cooking during the writing; and I thank Winston and Salem for their sovereign indifference to it all. Deborah Britzman and Christopher Fynsk have been with this project since it was but an infant paragraph. It would be impossible to exaggerate the debt lowe to each; if I have even approached something that might be called thinking, it is because they have encouraged me to join them in the audacity of their intellectual insubordinations. This thing is as much their fault as it is mine. When this book reaches print, it will be fifteen years since I met Harry Harootunian, mentor, colleague, and friend. What counts for me as the world would surely be a safer place had I not encountered him; just as surely, it would be insufferably dull. So, in dedicating this book to him, I merely mark the impossibility of any adequate acknowledgment of the gift of that friendship.

Contents

Priface

xi

Not Even a God Can Save Us Now

I

1

The Originary Multiplicity of the AIDS-Object 1 I The Global 41 The Erotic 101 Historicity 161 The Social 19 1 The Political

WHo 2

3

20

First Excursus on the Divine Right of the Historian

25

Apocalypse Now_Forever-Whenever

51

The Apocalyptic Sublime 51 1 The Work of Mourning 57 1 Unaccomplished Mourning 62

4

Four Itineraries in Search of a Narrative

74

The Phenomenological Itinerary 761 The Itinerary of Withdrawal 9 01 The Historical Itinerary 1001 The Geopolitical Itinerary 1021 The Itinerary of a Writing 107 1 Without Justification II6

5

Y Su Sangre Ya Viene Cantando The Erotic 1321 The Social 1421 The Cruelty of the Ethical 1 sol The Erotic Praxis ofPoiesis 157

I19

x

Conten ts

6

Second Excursus on the Divine Right of the Historian

160

Staging the Seen, the Unseen, and the Obscene 16 3

7

The Death of Michel Foucault

177

Toward a Politics of Inconsolable Perversity 179

Notes

205

Index

2 17

Preface Q. Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? A. Because it was dead.

-David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Kni ves

Impossibly, but necessarily, the body of this death is at once singular and multiple. In both its singularity and its multiplicity, but above all in the essentially erotic conjunction of its singularity and multiplicity, the body of this death is an impossible object for any apperception, any phenomenological apprehension, any auto-affectivity, any sp ecular capture. This book is therefore not about representations of the body, nor even about t~~ ". "~_