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Queer Optimism
*Michael Snediker *
/ Mount Holyoke College/
msnedike@mtholyoke.edu
(c) 2006 Michael Snediker.
All rights reserved.
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Epithets
1.
While optimism has made cameos in the pages of queer theory,
"queer" is not itself readily imaginable as one of optimism's
epithets. More familiar, perhaps, is Lauren Berlant's and Michael
Warner's invocation of "hegemonic optimism" in their 1998 essay,
"Sex in Public" (549). Berlant raises the spectre of "dubious
optimism" in her 2001 essay, "The Subject of True Feeling: Pain,
Privacy, and Politics" (129). The epithets "dubious" and
"hegemonic" construe optimism as a tease, a seduction that queer
theory might expose--and subsequently if not simultaneously
jettison altogether--as that which cozens liberals (queer and
non-queer) into complacency, the extensiveness and lure of which
would all the more require optimism's debunking.
2.
In the vernacular, optimism is often imagined epithetically as
"premature": as though if the optimist at hand knew all that she
could eventually know, she would retract her optimism altogether.
Prematurity would qualify optimism as a temporary state of
insufficient information. The phrase "woefully optimistic," on the
other hand, implies that the knowledge that would warrant
optimism's retraction might never arrive. As an epithet,
"woefully" (like "hegemonic," "dubious," or "premature") subjects
optimism to an outside judgment, the likes of which the optimist
in question is presumed unable to make. It is difficult to imagine
an optimist, as conventionally understood, denominating her own
optimism as woeful or premature. Indeed, the moment at which a
person is able to characterize her optimism as such might well
mark the moment at which being optimistic cedes, as a position, if
not to being pessimistic, then to something like being realistic.
(I will return to the idea that being pessimistic potentially is
potentially equivalent to being realistic.) The epithets
delineated, that is, do not describe optimism so much as impose a
diagnosis external to it that would make further characterizations
of optimism (and more to the point, attachments /to/ optimism)
unnecessary.
3.
For all the lexical and semantic differences between the above
epithets ("hegemonic," for instance, hardly seems synonymous with
"premature"), the optimism to which these epithets attach is
fundamentally the same. This optimism can describe the utopic
energy that motivates counterpublics (along the lines drawn by
Michael Warner); or more generally, the liberal nation-state; or
cynically, the inane recalcitrances of the Bush administration; or
literarily, the pluck of Pollyanna or Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick.
I do not seek a new relation (oppositional, proponential) to this
optimism. Rather, my essay calls for a revaluation of optimism
itself. The particular /élan/ that underwrites utopic optimisms
can be traced to Leibniz, and I shall turn later in the essay to
the ways Leibnizian optimism crucially differs from that of my own
project. Succinctly: utopic optimism--and following, the optimism
that crops up both in queer theory and critical theory more
generally--is attached, temporally, to a future. Not unrelated to
its futural (promissory, parousiac) stakes is its allergic
relation to knowledge. For Leibniz, as we shall see, optimism's
attachment to faith would render knowledge superfluous. In current
critical thought, optimism's very sanguinity implies an
epistemological deficit. This ostensibly definitional antagonistic
relation to knowledge has had the perhaps unsurprising effect of
taking optimism out of critical circulation. Queer optimism,
oppositely, is not promissory. It doesn't ask that some future
time make good on its own hopes. Rather, queer optimism asks that
optimism, embedded in its own immanent present, be /interesting/.
Queer optimism's interest--its capacity to be interesting, to hold
our attention--depends on its emphatic responsiveness to and
solicitation of rigorous thinking.
4.
Queer optimism, immanently rather than futurally oriented, does
not entail a predisposition in the way that conventional optimism
entails predisposition. More simply, it presents a critical field
and asks that this field be taken seriously. If my investigation,
then, extends to the likes of happiness, this is not because if
one were more queerly optimistic, one would feel happier. /Rather,
queer optimism can be considered as a form of meta-optimism/: it
wants to /think/ about feeling good, to make disparate aspects of
feeling good /thinkable/.
5.
Queer optimism, then, seeks to take positive affects as serious
and interesting sites of critical investigation. Likewise, queer
optimism insists on thinking about personhood (as opposed to
subjectivity) in terms of a durability not immediately or
proleptically subject to structuralist or post-structuralist
mistrust. Queer optimism concerns persons, rather than subjects or
even selves. The latter categories inhabit (and unknowingly
curate) particular discursive labyrinths (Cartesian, Foucaultian,
Althusserian, Hegelian, Lacanian, etc.) of discipline, desire, and
knowledge to which examinations of personhood at best only
obliquely speak. My theoretical preference for persons over
subjects asks how personhood variously can be characterized,
removed from the columbarium of subjectivity.
6. This critical project is born of the sense that queer theory, for
all its contributions to our thinking about affect, has had far
more to say about negative affects than positive ones.
Furthermore, that in its attachment to not taking persons as such
for granted, queer theory's suspicious relation to persons has
itself become suspiciously routinized, if not taken for granted in
its own right. Risking charges of producing but another reductive
binary, I shall for present, heuristic purposes be calling this
tropaic gravitation toward negative affect and depersonation
/queer pessimism/. It's worth noting that queer pessimism has as
little truck with conventional pessimism as queer optimism trucks
with optimism, /per se/. Still, queer theory's habitation of this
pessimistic field is cause for real concern. Melancholy,
self-shattering, the death drive, shame: these, within queer
theory, are categories to conjure with. These terms and the
scholarship energized by them do not in and of themselves comprise
queer theory. To argue that they do caricatures both queer theory
and the theorists who have put these terms on the map. However,
these terms have dominated queer-theoretical discourse, and they
have often seemed immune to queer theory's own perspicacities.
7.
My essay conducts a purposive survey of the work of Judith Butler,
Leo Bersani, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman. Without
taking as definitive either this survey or my analysis of any
given author, I wish these analyses to articulate a certain shape,
to describe a current of enchantment that has privileged
"suffering" and "dereliction" (to invoke two of Badiou's terms) as
sites both of ethics and understanding. Queer theory's analyses of
negative affect and ontological instability have been and continue
to be both generous and generative. My wish is to clear a space
for the possible generosities and generativities of queer
optimism's corresponding milieu. As space-clearing, this essay
does not deliver the queer-optimistic "goods," /per se/: positing
a compact or even synecdochal account of queer optimism is at
cross purposes with my reluctance to reduce queer optimism's field
before expanding it. I offer "Queer Optimism," here, in the spirit
of exordium and invitation.
Of Sadness & Certainty
8.
The year I told my parents I was gay was also the year of my first
sustained encounter with depression. At its bleakest, sadness and
self-loathing felt like the sole remainders of a self which in all
other aspects seemed untrustable and ersatz. Past happinesses
seemed the feat of terrific mountebanking, moored either to
monstrous ulterior motives or to machinically vacant automaticity.
Delight was a little boat on a sad sea; it was slight and,
simultaneously, perversely too heavy to be buoyant, too heavy
because so quickly waterlogged.[1 <#foot1>]
9.
What Elaine Scarry observed of physical suffering seemed as true
of psychological suffering, that "for the person in pain, so
incontestably, and unnegotiably present is it that 'having pain'
may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it
is to 'have certainty'" (4). Incontestable and unnegotiable,
sadness seemed certain, tenaciously and vibrantly so. If sadness
was the only thing I could feel utterly certain about, such an
observation dovetailed with the inkling that certainty was itself
a kind of sadness. Judith Butler's accounts of melancholy seemed
to confirm this latter possibility with an eloquence I had neither
will nor skill to contest. "I want to suggest," Butler writes,
"that rigid forms of gender and sexual identification, whether
homosexual or heterosexual, appear to spawn forms of melancholy"
(Psychic Life 144). Not just particularly gendered or sexual
identities, but "coherent identity position[s]" in general, are
suspect within Butler's account (149). "Perhaps," Butler
continues, "only by risking the /incoherence/ of identity is
connection possible" (149).[2 <#foot2>]
10.
It seemed, in my first engagements with Butler's texts, that I had
two options. I could risk my own incoherence (which is as much to
say, accept the originality /of/ that incoherence), or can attach
to coherence; as described by Butler, however, the latter can
never really be an option. How can a nascent queer theorist
indebted to and inspired by Butler choose the latter, when
coherence was constitutively equivalent to reification,
naturalization, and congealment? "Further," Butler writes, "this
[masculine or feminine] identity is constructed and maintained by
the consistent application of this taboo [against homosexuality],
not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with
discrete categories of sex, but in the production and
'disposition' of sexual desire" (Gender Trouble 81). To attach to
coherence would be to deny this series of "consistent
applications," to confuse repetition (amounting to congealment
[81] or sedimentation [178]) with a "false foundationalism, the
results of affectivity being formed or 'fixed' through the effects
of the prohibition [against homosexuality]" (81).[3 <#foot3>] The
globby abjection of a term like "congealment" should not, I think,
go without saying. As though it weren't bad enough that stability
could come only on the heels of melancholy, this stability
becomes, within Butler's rhetoric, not just melancholic but
disgusting, a sort of ontological aspic.
11.
My particular sadnesses, then, were all the more humiliating and
confusing in so closely reflecting the critical writings to which
I, as an initiate into queer theory, was attached. My experience
of feeling ersatz, however, had none of the thrill of reading
about being ersatz; likewise (to look ahead to another queer
paradigm), my experience of feeling shattered lacked all the
thrill of reading about being shattered. Stronger than the
excitement of radical new possibilities of self-losing, of the
vigorous embrace of factitiousness, was the grief of self-loss and
the consuming repellence of feeling fictive. It seemed humiliating
to approximate, even literalize, the conditions that in theory
seemed so important, even exhilarating; but only to approximate
them, to come up short. What I wanted for myself was the opposite
of what I found intellectually most interesting and vital.
12.
What I noticed only later, returning to Butler's texts, was the
puzzling disjunction between the permanence ascribed to identities
and the permanence ascribed to melancholy itself. Whereas
identities appeared permanent (or became permanent through a
process unsavory as congealment), melancholy simply /was/
permanent. "This [melancholy] identification is not simply
momentary or occasional, but becomes a new structure of identity"
(Gender Trouble 74). Whereas the identity borne of melancholy
required constant, quotidian maintenance, melancholy itself was
described as a "permanent internalization" (74). Furthermore,
Butler's inclination to describe melancholy's technique as
"magical" rendered melancholy unimpeachable (73). Melancholy
wasn't like a magic trick, in the manner of debunkable smoke and
mirrors; /it was simply magic/, a process beyond explanation, not
entailing a suspension of disbelief, but seducing one /into/
belief. Its effects were proof of its reality, and beyond
analysis: unlike the identities that both "spawn[ed]" (Psychic
Life 144) and were spawned by melancholy,[4 <#foot4>] whose
congealed repetitions and machinic habits were nothing, under
Butler's perspicacious eye, if not susceptible to challenge and
revision. Melancholy, that is, produced what would (erroneously)
be experienced as coherent or certain identity, even as this false
coherence was founded on the certain permanence of a melancholy
whose reality was beyond reproach.
13.
For Leo Bersani, stable identities aren't melancholic, but rather
the source of interpsychical aggression. In one of his most recent
books, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity, Bersani
reprises his conception of persons as fundamentally destructive,
and sexuality as that which underwrites both auto- and
allo-destructiveness. Bersani and co-author Ulysse Dutoit write:
If we dismiss--as it seems to us we should--the more or less
optimistic psychoanalytic theories between Freud and Lacan,
theories that would make us more or less happy by way of such
things as adaptation to the real and genital normalcy, then we
may judge the great achievement of psychoanalysis to be its
attempt to account for our inability to love others, and
ourselves. The promises of adaptive balance and sexual
maturity undoubtedly explain the phenomenal appeal of
psychoanalysis as therapy, but its greatness may lie in its
insistence on an intractable human destructiveness--a
destructiveness resistant to any therapeutic endeavours
whatsoever. This has little to do with sex, and we can
distinguish between the practices normally identified as sex
and a permanent, irreducibly destructive disposition which the
great figures of psychoanalytic theory--especially Freud,
Klein, Laplanche and Lacan--more or less explicitly define as
sexuality. (124-25)[5 <#foot5>]
14.
Bersani's and Dutoit's qualification of optimism and happiness as
"more or less" connotes less optimism's insidiousness--an
allegation more readily detectable in Berlant's and Warner's
affixing of "optimism" and "hegemonic"--than its
inconsequentiality. Whether insidious or inconsequential, the
result, however, is the same; optimism, for Bersani and Dutoit,
calls not for further inquiry, but for "dismiss[al]." The grounds
for dismissal, here, lie in the teleological alignment of those
"more or less optimistic psychoanalytic theories'" with "real and
genital normalcy." In its imbricating of "real and genital
normalcy" with the implicit factitiousness of both "real" and
"normalcy" (/and/, in turn, its suggestion of heterosexuality's
conscription of this factitiousness as its own perseveratingly
veracious prerogative), Bersani's etiolated sketch of
psychoanalysis resembles Berlant's own recent analysis of
optimism's inextricability from the coercions of love.[6 <#foot6>]
But even /if/ queer theory positions normativity as heterosexual
fantasy (and vice versa), why does it follow that heterosexuality
necessarily monopolizes optimism? Why couldn't optimism
alternately navigate the non-normative? Or be conceived as other
than universalized and universalizing? The dismissible
inconsequentiality of the above passage's optimism contrasts
starkly with the passage's subsequent account of "destructive
disposition" as "permanent," and "irreducibly so," specifications
rhetorically similar to Butler's depictions of melancholy. Queer
optimism seeks to turn these tables--to consider the possible
permanences of optimism, the possible fictions of aggression.
15.
Bersani omits British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott from his
catalogue of "great figures of psychoanalytic theory," perhaps, in
part, because Winnicott's theorizations of aggression challenge
the intrinsically negative, malfeasant valence of Bersani's
primordial destructiveness. Contrary to Bersani's invocation of
"human destructiveness" as commensurate with (if not underwriting)
"our inability to love others," Winnicott argues provocatively and
sensitively that /destructiveness is itself a condition for love/.
Unlike Bersani's consideration of love's destructive tendencies,[7
<#foot7>] Winnicott's insights are not reducible to theorizations
of masochism insistent upon desire's inextricability from pain.
Rather, Winnicott's insights pertain to a sphere more expansive
than that in which desire and masochism so quickly collide.
Winnicott writes thus, in his crucial essay, "The Use of an Object
and Relating Through Identifications":
This change (from relating to usage) means that the subject
destroys the object. From here it could be argued by an
armchair philosopher that there is therefore no such thing in
practice as the use of an object: if the object is external,
then the object is destroyed by the subject. Should the
philosopher come out of his chair and sit on the floor with
his patient, however, he will find that there is an
intermediate position. In other words, he will find that after
"subject relates to object" comes "subject destroys object"
(as it becomes external); and then may come "/object survives/
destruction by the subject." But there may or may not be
survival. A new feature thus arrives in the theory of
object-relating. The subject says to the object: "I destroyed
you," and the object is there to receive the communication.
From now on the subject says: "Hullo object!" "I destroyed
you." "I love you." "You have value for me because of your
survival of my destruction of you." "While I am loving you I
am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) /fantasy/."
Here fantasy begins for the individual. The subject can now
/use/ the object that has survived. It is important to note
that it is not only that the subject destroys the object
because the object is placed outside the area of omnipotent
control. It is equally significant to state this the other way
round and to say that it is the destruction of the object that
places the object outside the area of the subject's omnipotent
control. In these ways the object develops its own autonomy
and life, and (if it survives) contributes-in to the subject,
according to its own properties. (89-90)
Winnicott's conception of destructiveness amounts to a theory of
love (as opposed to desire) to the extent that /the object
survives the destructiveness dealt to it/. This is to mark within
Winnicott's work an interest in and valuation of durability that
is not inapposite to my own. Put more directly, an object's
durability as such signals that it /is/ an object, and this
durability is not recognizable to the Winnicottian subject without
the fantasy of destroying it. The destructiveness that an object
can withstand, for Winnicott, demonstrates not just the object's
own integrity (an integrity from which the subject might
subsequently learn), but its own capacity for loving /in spite of/
feeling damaged or even repelled by the subject. This form of
durability (opposite Butler's flinching congealment) offers an
important psychoanalytic context in which to imagine my own
subsequent readings. Winnicott's work seems indispensable both to
future queer engagements with psychoanalysis, and not unrelatedly
to particularly psychoanalytically-conceived modes of optimistic
thinking and practice.
16.
Contrary to Winnicottian destructiveness, Bersanian
self-shattering amounts to a temporary figurative suicide, a
moment's disorganization within a field of otherwise intense
regulation; or oppositely, an internalization of the destructive,
shattering energies otherwise directed outward. Whereas Butler
deploys Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" in the service of
producing a genealogy of subjects, Bersani illuminates resistances
and impasses internal to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle
that collectively suggest a violence far more capacious than the
one Freud's text manifestly delineates. "What has been repressed
from the speculative second half of Freud's text," Bersani writes,
"is sexuality as productive masochism. /The possibility of
exploiting the shattering effects of sexuality in order to
maintain the tensions of an eroticized, de-narrativized, and
mobile consciousness has been neglected, or refused, in favor of a
view of pleasure as nothing more than the reduction of all tension
and the evacuation of all excitement/" (Freudian Body 63-64). In
"Is the Rectum a Grave?" Bersani more explicitly narrativizes
self-shattering and the conditions from which its need arises:
The self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which
sexuality is associated with power. It is possible to think of
the sexual as, precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of
self and a loss of all consciousness of self. But sex as
self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of sex as
self-abolition. It inaccurately replicates self-shattering as
self-swelling, as psychic tumescence. If, as these words
suggest, men are especially apt to "choose" this version of
sexual pleasure, because their sexual equipment appears to
invite by analogy, or at least to facilitate, the phallicizing
of the ego, neither sex has exclusive rights to the practice
of sex as self-hyperbole. For it is perhaps primarily /the
degeneration of the sexual into a relationship that condemns
sexuality to becoming a struggle for power./ As soon as
persons are posited, the war begins. It is the self that
swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self
that makes of the inevitable play of thrusts and
relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority
of one sex over the other. (218)
Sex, for Bersani, becomes a spectacular, radical literalization of
deconstruction. The "shattering" of sex undoes persons the way
queer theory (as paradigmatically practiced by Butler) undoes
persons.
17.
I might say here that this essay has less to do theoretically with
my own engagements with Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis than
it does with queer theory's mobilizations of particular
psychoanalytic topoi. More to the point, I am concerned with the
particular strains of queer theory that such mobilizations both
enable and preempt. For all my interest in Freud, my attention is
not primarily to his texts, but to particular receptions of him
within queer theory. Freud's own body of work indubitably remains
an important site from which to challenge ostensibly uniforming,
simplifying distillations of psychoanalysis. As just one instance
of Freud's usefulness in the interrogation of his reception, one
might consider Butler's dependence on a particular passage from
The Ego and the Id. Freud observes thus:
When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object,
there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can
only be described as a setting up of the object inside the
ego, as it occurs in melancholia. (29)
Butler's reading of this passage takes for granted that a process
structurally /analogous/ to that of melancholic incorporation ("as
it occurs in melancholia") is itself /equivalent/ to melancholia:
If we accept the notion that heterosexuality naturalized
itself by insisting on the radical otherness of homosexuality,
then heterosexual identity is purchased through a melancholic
incorporation of the love that it disavows: the man who
insists upon the coherence of his heterosexuality will claim
that he never loved another man, and hence never lost another
man. That love, that attachment, becomes subject to a double
disavowal, a never having loved, a never having lost . . . .
What ensues is a culture of gender melancholy in which
masculinity and femininity emerge as the traces of an
ungrieved and ungrievable love. (Psychic Life 139-40)
My interest, contra Butler's, lies in the extent to which Freud's
account does not literally produce equivalence so much as insist
upon similarity. In following a structural pattern that is /like
melancholia/, the process described seems most readily /not/ to be
melancholic; analogy marks a structural similarity but explicitly
not an affective one. Thus, such a passage from Freud's writings
might not singularly corroborate Butler's argument that sexual
loss effects gender melancholy, but also pressure Freud's and
Butler's readers to query precisely the /differences/ between the
loss of a sexual object and the losses particular to melancholy as
such.
18.
There is much in Bersani and Butler to disagree with. Nonetheless,
within queer theory (as it has been and is currently being
practiced), no one with the exception of Sedgwick has been more
influential. The list of essays and books variously indebted to
the insights of Butler and Bersani is long, and ever lengthening.
The number of times Butler and Bersani are noted in the index of
Tim Dean's and Christopher Lane's Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis
(well over fifty instances) far exceeds references to such seminal
psychoanalysts as Sándor Ferenczi (four cites) or Winnicott
(zero). While one cannot equate influence with this kind of
indexical showing, one nonetheless can get a sense of the extent
to which Butler and Bersani have become part of a canon, contested
as the category of canonicity (in queer theory /or/ in
psychoanalysis) might be.[8 <#foot8>]
19.
Even as Butler and Bersani have positioned their work in the
context of AIDS, hate-crimes, and other lived domains of crisis,[9
<#foot9>] their work, with telling insistence, often depends on
abstraction, on metaphor. One doesn't /really/ shatter when one is
fucked, despite Bersani's accounts of it as such; millions of
persons who imagine their subjectivity as fairly cohesive and
non-fictive do not necessarily feel melancholy, even if Butler
would claim melancholy as the inevitable cost of that
cohesiveness. If these models of shattering and gender-melancholy
seem less than practicable in lived experience, they've become
ubiquitous in the no less lived biosphere of the academy.
20.
The alchemy of such figurations demarcates an ever-fluctuating
space between (theoretical) scrutiny and (ontological) practice.
How to get from one domain to another, without the complex alchemy
of figurativity? How might one articulate what happens within the
limbo of the figurative? I see figuration as syncope between
theoretical and practical domains, between literary and lived
investments. Deleuze, in Essays Critical and Clinical, writes that
"health as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people
who are missing. It is the task of the fabulating function to
invent a people" (4). What if the people who were missing, the
people this essay sought to invent, were missing optimists? The
non-Bush optimists, the queer optimists, with a voice differing
from both queer theory /and/ optimism, as usually understood?
21.
If Deleuze's turn to literature's "fabulating function" does not
exactly illuminate fabulation's particular mechanisms, it
nonetheless reminds us that fabulation is a function (of
something, on something), whose structures and ends can and ought
prompt explication in ways that figuration, in its slippery
whisper of self-evidence, too often theoretically eludes. At the
same time, it strikes me that the move to figuration within
theoretical discourse often is a premature one. The transformation
of non-figurative phenomena into figurative phenomena as often is
a consequence of saturating cathexes that fetishize (and
fetishistically treat) phenomena without acknowledgment of either
their cathectic pulsions or the fetishization in which they
participate.
22.
Along these lines, I again stress the salutary utility of
Winnicott, specifically Winnicott's non-ironic denomination of
adolescent depression as "doldrums." Adumbrated by the gravities
of melancholy, doldrums might seem comparably slight. Winnicott,
however, does not take his nominally non-enthralled category
lightly. Doldrums, clinically, /are/ experienced as miserable, and
theoretically, /are/ something that psychoanalysis can engage
seriously (and compassionately), from which psychoanalysis can
learn. For the purposes of queer optimism, I value the extent to
which doldrums resist melancholy's ostensible capacity to
nominally colonize all experiences similar to it. The more there
are doldrums, the less of a stronghold melancholy maintains over a
field more various and differentiated than one term ever could
describe. This Winnicottian de-fetishization of terms seems all
the more salient an intellectual (and therapeutic) model in the
context of David Eng's and David Kazanjian's edited volume, Loss
(2003), in which accounts of intense resilience and creativity
seem ultimately mischaracterized by their no less intense
absorption into the category of melancholia, which, write Eng and
Kazanjian, "at the turn of the century has emerged as a crucial
touchstone for social and subjective formulations" (23).
23.
There seems in Eng's and Kazanjian's collection a conspicuous
disparity between innovative scholarship and regression to nominal
"touchstones," as though after Freud's dichotomizing of mourning
and melancholia, a scholar's choice were de facto only between
these two categories. Such a disparity likewise is manifest in Ann
Cvetkovich's coterminous An Archive of Feelings. "What's
required," Cvetkovich writes, "is a sex positivity that can
embrace negativity, including trauma. Allowing a place for trauma
within sexuality is consistent with efforts to keep sexuality
queer, to maintain a space for shame and perversion within public
discourse rather than purging them of their messiness in order to
make them acceptable" (63). Cvetkovich wants a trauma that could
describe nearly any lesbian experience (53-55), insisting on the
de-pathologization /of/ trauma (44-46), but simultaneously wants
perversities to sustain their shocking edge. The result is an
astute study that seems less energized by its recurrent invoking
of trauma, than hampered by a misnomer for a range of experiences
better left articulated in their specificity, rather than
condensed to a single traumatic term. Winnicott speaks of a
similar condensation in Freud's original delineation of the death
drive:
when we look anew at the roots of aggression there are two
concepts in particular, each of which must be thrown away
deliberately, so that we may see whether . . . we are better
off without them. One is Freud's concept of a death instinct,
a by-product of his speculations in which he seemed to be
achieving a theoretical simplification that might be compared
to the gradual elimination of detail in the technique of a
sculptor like Michelangelo. The other is Melanie Klein's
setting up of envy in the prominent place that she gave it at
Geneva in 1955. ("Roots" 458-59)
Winnicott's polemic distinguishes helpfully between the existence
of a range of energies or pulsions and the denomination of that
range as one "concept." My reservation regarding works such as
Cvetkovich's has less to do with any given set of "speculations,"
which (as Winnicott suggests) are often innovative and adroit,
than with their resigned gravitation to a single concept, which
can't possibly do speculations as such justice. The more one can
transform speculations into concepts, the more likely one is to
turn observations into figurations. Easy enough, as Eng and
Kazanjian demonstrate, to wax lyrical on melancholy.[10 <#foot10>]
Harder to wax lyrical about "doldrums," and thus "doldrums," for
all its banality, retains a useful nonfigurative (or at least
differently figurative) specificity.
Loving Shame
Faithful, was all that I could boast
But Constancy became
To her, by her innominate
A something like a shame
--Emily Dickinson, Franklin 1716
24.
Melancholy and aggression, this essay has argued, are
undertheorized terms in queer theory that have nonetheless
galvanized a vital and proliferative body of work. Vital and
proliferative, but also foreclosing, in its demarcation of an
intellectual field that reinforces the intellectual non-viability
of a different terrain, which I am calling the field of queer
optimism. This section of the essay engages with shame (as opposed
to melancholy, aggression, or self-shattering); it departs from
the psychoanalytic, partly to attest that queer pessimism isn't
more simply a /psychoanalytic/ pessimism. I'm likewise moved to
write about queer theorizations of shame because much of this work
(itself intentionally seeking to circumnavigate a psychoanalytic
argot) in fact seems /optimistically motivated/. This is not to
say that much of queer theory isn't likewise optimistically
motivated: much of Butler's work seems thus energized, even as its
optimistic premise nevertheless deploys a comparatively less
optimistic-seeming lexicon of melancholy.
25.
I mean, here, to distinguish between the energy that motivates a
theoretical enterprise and the subject /of/ that enterprise. Queer
optimism (/pace/ inevitable charges of sloppiness by hard-core
nominalists) speaks less to what /motivates/ a project than to a
project's content. Optimistic motivations (of Butler, or even
Bersani, and many other theorists[11 <#foot11>) could correspond
to Gramsci's "optimism of the will," while queer optimism would
not. This is the case because Gramsci's optimism does not seem
radically different from optimism as usually conceived, whereas
queer optimism, /prima facie/, seeks to complicate /how/ optimism
is conceived. This is not to say that I do not feel solidarity
with recent interventions in pessimistic methodology (for
instance, challenges to what Paul Ricoeur first termed a
hermeneutics of suspicion).[12 <#foot12>] Queer optimism, however,
calls for a different /sort/ of intervention, an intervention on
the level of content rather than of practice. On the level of
practice, then, I'm sympathetic toward Butler's recent invoking of
hope. "I hope to show," Butler writes in Giving an Account of
Oneself, "that morality is neither a symptom of its social
conditions nor a site of transcendence of them, but rather is
essential to the determination of agency and the possibility of
hope" (21). The formulation, "possibility of hope," confirms what
in a subsequent sentence Butler makes clear: that hope inhabits a
horizon, emergent "at the limits of our schemes of
intelligibility" (21). This hope, in content if not necessarily in
practice, differs from queer optimism in that hope
held-as-promissory (or "possibility"), or consigned to
intelligibility's limits, is only fleetingly intelligible--which
is to say, estranged from immanent, fastidious articulation.
26.
Hope is promissory, hope is a horizon. Shame, on the other hand,
occurs in a lavish present tense. This, again, helps clarify my
turn to shame. What if the field of queer optimism could be
situated /as firmly/ in the present tense /as shame/? Even as work
/on/ shame may arise out of generosity and hopefulness, this work,
within queer theory and affect theory, provides shame all the more
eloquent and vibrant a vocabulary, leaving positive affect itself
lexically impoverished. That positive affect would seem naturally
less available to thinking (or that hope definitionally would
exist futurally, and shame immanently) is the sort of temporal
donnée against which this essay speaks.
27.
I have here distinguished between motivation and content because
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theorizations of shame are indubitably,
magnanimously optimistic and good-intentioned. Furthermore, the
/bon esprit/ that suffuse Sedgwick's work--the inseparability, in
her writing, of delight and perspicacity--have inspired my own
thinking in ways for which I hardly can account. If ignorance
attaches to bliss,[13 <#foot13>] Sedgwick's trenchant complicating
/of/ ignorance (Epistemology 5) has made my chiasmatic attempt to
complicate bliss possible. More simply, I imagine my project as a
furthering of Sedgwick's account of tantalizingly /immanent/ joy,
in Proust:
In Freud, then, there would be no room--except as an example
of self-delusion--for the Proustian epistemology whereby the
narrator of /A la recherche;/, who feels in the last volume
"jostling each other within me a whole host of truths
concerning human passions and character and conduct,"
recognizes them /as/ truths insofar as "/the perception of
[them] caused me joy/." In the paranoid Freudian epistemology,
it is implausible enough to suppose that truth could be even
an accidental occasion of joy; inconceivable to imagine joy as
a guarantor of truth. Indeed, from any point of view it is
circular, or something, to suppose that one's pleasure at
knowing something could be taken as evidence of the truth of
the knowledge. ("Paranoid Reading" 137-38)
I'm riveted by the idea that joy could be a guarantor of
truth--differently put, that joy could be persuasive. While
qualifying the above observations with a caveat against tautology,
Sedgwick's later analyses of shame are marvelous in part for their
escape /of/ tautology, such that shame would yield knowledges not
at all equivalent to the sense of shame with which one starts.
This new body of knowledge, all the same, defers to a /nominal/
circularity--what no longer resembles shame, in Sedgwick's
writing, still is called shame. Why would this necessarily be the
case? Given shame's (or, for that matter, melancholy's) lability
within queer theory, why might queer optimism's subjects not be
analogously labile?
28.
In "Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity," Sedgwick
charts the exuberant, ambivalent affects of Henry James as he
returns (in writing the prefaces for the New York Edition) to his
own earlier novels and characters and to his own earlier authorial
selves. In these prefaces (as in nearly everything he writes),
James's affective range is expansive, fastidious and ravishing,
but the affect toward which Sedgwick turns (indeed, the affect,
for Sedgwick, that comes to organize, beget and describe most
other affects) is shame:
The speaking self of the prefaces does not attempt to merge
with the potentially shaming or shamed figurations of its
younger self, younger fictions, younger heroes; its attempt is
to love them. That love is shown to occur both in spite of
shame and, more remarkably, through it. (40)
The love of shame is the love between a "younger self" and the
self that is currently writing; in the distance between selves,
the younger self might arguably be experienced not only as having
written those "younger fictions," but as a "younger fiction" in
its own right. The love of shame occurs in the disruption of what
might otherwise be seen as a continuous self. The love of shame
does not "merge," does not synthesize, but flourishes in the very
space of personal fissure. This is unsurprising, in that Silvan
Tomkins (whose work Sedgwick's extends and to which it pays
homage) describes shame as "strik[ing] deepest into the heart of
man":
While terror and distress hurt, they are wounds inflicted from
outside which penetrate the smooth surface of the ego; but
shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul. It
does not matter whether the humiliated one has been shamed by
derisive laughter or whether he mocks himself. In either event
he feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in
dignity and worth. (133)
29.
Tomkins associates shame with guilt, and to a lesser extent with
humiliation. I think also of a particularly resonant (if only
because so pervasively, campily familiar) articulation of the link
between shame and embarrassment: /I could just die!/ Teenagers
often say this in movies after they have done something
embarrassing, or if their parents have done something terrible in
their presence. Less common now than in the fifties (cf. Sandra
Dee), the articulation clarifies an implicit relation between
shame and the strategies of self-abdication found in Butler and
Bersani. /I could just die!/ More often a performance of shame
than a literal threat (shame, after all, is, as Sedgwick suggests,
the performative affect par excellence[14 <#foot14>]), this
articulation of shame nonetheless speaks to the ways shame, as an
affect, erupts not just in the space between one version of self
and another (as in James), but also in the space where one /wants/
another self, and more acutely, to give up the self one /has/.[15
<#foot15>]
30.
"Shame," Tomkins writes, is "a specific inhibitor of continuing
interest and enjoyment" (134). I want to emphasize that shame can
also /inhibit continuity/. To live without shame, putatively,
would be to live continuously, without the trauma of wanting to
disappear, without the need to reinvent one's "younger self" as a
new if no less fictional person. A life without shame (neither
plausible nor necessarily desirable, but entertained here
hypothetically) might approach the stability of Butler's
melancholy congealment, even as Tomkins writes that shame, in its
renunciation of or abandonment by a loved one, is "not unlike
mourning, in which I become exquisitely aware of the self just
because I will not surrender the love object which must be
surrendered" (138). Here we come to a double-bind. The stable self
is constitutively melancholic, and yet the unstable self, florid
with "its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social
metamorphic possibilities" (Sedgwick, "Shame" 65) is constituted
by an affect that might "not [be] unlike mourning." Why should the
opposite paths of ontological stability and instability seem to go
in circles?
31.
Shame, for Sedgwick, "generates and legitimates the place of
identity . . . but does so without giving that identity space the
standing of an essence" (64). While identities are not to be
essentialized, however, Sedgwick claims that "at least for certain
('queer') people, shame is simply the first, and remains a
permanent, structuring fact of identity" (64). Sedgwick's
"simply," "permanent" and "fact" effect a strange dissonance
between shame's fostering of affective and ontological
equivocation (what Sedgwick terms "possibilities") and its own
utterly stringent unequivocality. Shame, as conjured by Sedgwick,
seldom seems shame-like, per se. So to Sedgwick's credit, we can
see in James how a "potentially paralyzing affect" can be
"narratively, emotionally, and performatively productive" (44).
What Sedgwick identifies in James's writing as "occasions for
shame and excitement" (46) do not, however, seem directly to bear
on shame. Sedgwick cites this passage from James's preface to The
Wings of the Dove:
I haven't the heart now, I confess, to adduce the detail of so
many lapsed importances; the explanations of most of which,
after all, I take to have been in the crudity of a truth
beating full upon me through these reconsiderations, the odd
inveteracy with which picture, at almost any turn, is jealous
of drama, and drama (though on the whole with greater
patience, I think) suspicious of picture. Between them, no
doubt, they do much for the theme; yet each baffles
insidiously the other's ideals and eats round the edges of its
positions. (46)
Why denominate these various affective maneuvers--these
magnificently odd personifications of aesthetic media--shame, when
they seem, affectively, so variously tinged with delight (for
instance, the delight of imagining "drama" and "picture" eating
around each other's edges)? Such a question, following both the
early work of Charles Darwin, and the more recent work of Mark
Hansen, attempts to characterize not just what any particular
affect is, but how long it lasts, what it cedes to, and why or how
it cedes.[16 <#foot16>] The degree to which Sedgwick's conception
of shame, at this Jamesian juncture, seems more convincing on a
nominal rather than affective register recalls, again, the ways
Butler's melancholy often doesn't quite /seem/ melancholic (in her
work or as recounted in a work such as Julia Kristeva's Black
Sun). Or the way Bersani's self-shattering describes an
obliteration that on a somatic level (or even, speculatively, on a
psychical one) doesn't occur so much as hover, tantalizingly, as
an idea.
32.
"Blazons of shame, the 'fallen face' with eyes down and head
averted--and, to a lesser extent, the blush--are semaphores of
trouble and at the same time of a desire to reconstitute the
interpersonal bridge" (Sedgwick, "Shame" 36). I would question the
inevitable simultaneity of shame's semaphoric "trouble" and its
desire for reconnection. Shame (at its most felicitous) cedes to a
desire to reconstitute interpersonality, but this desire is
neither synchronous with nor necessarily equivalent to shame's
desire to hide. Sedgwick posits shame as "the first" and
"permanent, structuring fact of [certain ('queer')] identity":
Queer, I'd suggest, might usefully be thought of as referring
in the first place to this group or an overlapping group of
infants and children, those whose sense of identity is for
some reason tuned most durably to the note of shame . . . .
The shame-delineated place of identity doesn't determine the
consistency or meaning of that identity, and race, gender,
class, sexuality, appearance, and abledness are only a few of
the defining social constructions that will crystallize there,
developing from this originary affect their particular
structures of expression, creativity, pleasure, and struggle.
(63)
Why, in the midst of all these social constructions, is shame
granted originary privilege? Tomkins usefully notes that before
shame there exists an even more originary positivity:
One of the paradoxical consequences of the linkage of positive
affect and shame is that the same positive affect which ties
the self to the object also ties the self to shame. To the
extent to which socialization involves a preponderance of
positive affect the individual is made vulnerable to shame and
unwilling to renounce either himself or others. (138-39)
Before one can have shame, before one can be disappointed into
blushing (or performative blazoning), one must previously have
nursed some "preponderance of positive affect." But why, if
positive affect so clearly precedes shame, is shame so
unequivocally pronounced foundational? I don't disagree with
Sedgwick on the point of shame's seeming intertwined in queer
experience. I nonetheless challenge the insistence of shame's
anteriority; at the expense of elaborations of the sorts of
positivity that might have preceded it, at the expense of the
queer continuities which shame might be able to interrupt.
Toujours du Jour
33.
I do not take my readings of Butler or Bersani as definitive, nor
do I imagine these moments in the work of Butler or Bersani as
synechdocally representative of their work. I mean, rather, to
articulate some of the ways in which Butler's and Bersani's
rigorous thinking itself sometimes seems predicated on curiously
nonrigorous attachments (in the case of Butler) to melancholy, or
(in the case of Bersani) to an unqualified aggression calling
forth a no less qualified resort to self-shattering. My account of
Sedgwick does not critique Sedgwick's analyses of shame for lack
of inventive and generous scrutiny (the sort of scrutiny I find
absent in Butler's and Bersani's respective accounts of melancholy
or aggression). Rather, I've sought to note how Sedgwick's
thinking makes available an affective territory far more
interesting and various than the denomination "shame" could (or
further, /should/) describe.
34.
Juxtaposed with Lee Edelman's 2004 book, No Future, the
orchestratively powerful but nonetheless opaque queer pessimism of
the above theorists would seem like kid stuff (to invoke Edelman's
own charged turn to this formulation). The queer pessimism of
Butler and Bersani, circuited from text to text in a
persuasiveness inseparable from its occludedness, brings to mind
Jean Laplanche's enigmatic signifier.[17 <#foot17>] Edelman's
queer pessimism, by contrast, insistent on its own absolute
non-enigmatic unequivocality, might suggest the draconian bravura
of a superego were Edelman's project not so pitted /against/ the
superego, pitted against all forms of stable identity except the
"irreducible" (No Future 6) identity of the death drive. Though
moving beyond the strictures of psychoanalysis, it is difficult
for me not to hear in the sheer /absoluteness/ of Edelman's dicta
something /like/ a superego's militancy.
35.
Edelman insists that "the only oppositional status to which our
queerness could ever lead would depend on our taking seriously the
place of the death drive we're called on to figure" (30). Edelman,
as the passage I've cited suggests, doesn't seem to leave queers a
lot of options, even as the option he adjures hardly seems
self-evident. The egregious militancy of No Future presents an
apogee of what I've been calling queer pessimism. Or if not an
apogee, then a sort of /pessimism-drag/. My own thinking differs
from Edelman's in many ways, and might often go without saying.[18
<#foot18>] How, for instance, could a project attached to queer
optimism /not/ bristle at a book that insists unilaterally that
"the only oppositional status" available to queers demands fealty
to the death drive? Edelman's book certainly trounces optimism,
but the optimism he trounces is /not/ the optimism for which my
own project lobbies. Edelman writes thus:
The structuring optimism of politics to which the order of
meaning commits us, installing as it does the perpetual hope
of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I would
argue, a negation of this primal, constitutive, and negative
act. And the various positivities produced in its wake by the
logic of political hope depend on the mathematical illusion
that negated negations might somehow escape, and not redouble,
such negativity. My polemic thus stakes its fortunes on a
truly hopeless wager: that taking the Symbolic's negativity to
the very letter of the law . . . that turning the force of
queerness against all subjects, however queer, can afford an
access to the /jouissance/ that at once defines us and negates
us. Or better: can expose the constancy, the inescapability,
of such access to /jouissance/ in the social order itself,
even if that order can access its constant access to
/jouissance/ only in the process of abjecting that constancy
of access onto the queer. (5)
As I've made clear, and as this essay's final section will make
clearer, queer optimism is no more attached to "the logic of
political hope" than No Future is. Even as I think there /are/
some forms of hope worth defending, I'm not interested, for
present purposes, in demarcating good and bad hopes, hegemonic and
nonhegemonic attachments to futurity. To the extent that my own
project seeks to recuperate optimism's potential critical interest
by arguing for its separability from the promissory, I'm here
insisting that there are ways of resisting a pernicious logic of
"reproductive futurism" besides embodying the death drive. If
Edelman opines that all forms of optimism eventually lead to
Little Orphan Annie singing "Tomorrow," and therefore that all
forms of optimism must be met with queer death-driven irony's
"always explosive force" (31), I oppositely insist that optimism's
limited cultural and theoretical intelligibility might not call
for optimism's grandiose excoriation, but for optimism to be
rethought along /non-futural/ lines. Edelman's hypostasization of
optimism accepts optimism as at best simplistic and at worst
fascistic. This hypostasization leaves unthinkable queer
optimism's own proposition that the reduction of optimism to a
diachronic, futurally bound axis is itself the outcome of a
machinery that spits out optimism as junk, and renders suspicious
any form of "enjoyment" that isn't a (mis)translation of
/jouissance/, "a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity,
meaning, and law" (25), the production of "identity as
mortification." Enjoyment, anyone?[19 <#foot19>]
36.
Edelman's might be /one/ way of refusing the logic of reproductive
futurism, but not the only one. That there would be many possible
queer courses of action might indeed seem to follow from Edelman's
invoking of Lacanian truth ("/Wunsch/") as characterized by
nothing so much as its extravagant, recalcitrant particularity.
"The /Wunsch/," Lacan writes in a passage cited in No Future's
introduction, "does not have the character of a universal law but,
on the contrary, of the most particular of laws--even if it is
universal that this particularity is to be found in every human
being" (6). This truth, which Edelman aligns with "queerness" (and
ergo with negativity, the death-drive, /jouissance/, etc.) "does
not have the character of a universal law." Edelman, for all his
attentiveness to the Lacanian "letter of the law," glosses Lacan's
own argument with a symptomatic liberality. "Truth, like
queerness," Edelman writes, "finds its value not in a good
susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn
particularity that voids every notion of a general good. The
embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if
justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value"
(6). Lacan, however, does not speak, even in Jacques-Alain
Miller's translation, of a "general good." He speaks of a
universal, which might be good /or bad/. Furthermore, if the only
characteristic universally applicable to this "truth, like
queerness" is its particularity, what sort of particularity voids
/every/ notion of a general good? Might so intransigent a
particularity sometimes /not/ void a universal, good /or/ bad?
37.
My line of inquiry might seem petty, but my question, in fact,
illuminates how little Edelman's argument can hold onto the
particularity on which it is partly premised. "The queer," Edelman
insists, "insists that politics is always a politics of the
signifier" (6). Edelman likewise insists that "queer theory must
always insist on its connection to the vicissitudes of the sign"
(7). The ubiquity of "always" and "every" in Edelman's argument is
nearly stunning, and it seems to me indicative of No Future's
coerciveness, as a different passage from No Future's introduction
quite handily demonstrates:
Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription
of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to
consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of
forging thereby some more perfect social order--such a hope,
after all, would only reproduce the constraining mandate of
futurism, just as any such order would equally occasion the
negativity of the queer--but rather to refuse the insistence
of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of
an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable,
irresponsible, inhumane. And the trump card of affirmation?
Always the question: If not this, what? Always the demand to
translate the insistence, the pulsive /force/, of negativity
into some determinate stance or "position" whose determination
would negate it: always the imperative to immure it in some
stable and positive form. (4)
Always this, always this, always that. This absoluteness in
Edelman's characterization of affirmation, meant to rally and
provoke, recalls Sedgwick's incredulous reading of Fredric
Jameson's ukase, "Always historicize." "What could have less to
do," Sedgwick rightly asks, "with historicizing than the
commanding, atemporal adverb 'always'" ("Paranoid Reading" 125)?
What, for that matter, could have less to do with
particularizations? The axiomatic thrust of Edelman's "always"
would seem to make the world so irrevocably /one thing/ that
response /to/ the world would amount to /one thing/. But still:
why would rejecting a primary attachment to futurity (regardless
of what this futurity always does or doesn't do) /necessarily/
require embodying negativity?[20 <#foot20>]
38.
Edelman's queer pessimism positions itself as "our" only option
without having exhausted what other options might glimmeringly
look like. This glimmer doesn't conjure the sort of horizon
Edelman would be so quick to dismantle. Rather, it suggests that
not all optimisms are a priori equivalent to each other. And as
importantly, that not all queer theories need look like Edelman's.
"As a particular story . . . of why storytelling fails," Edelman
writes, "queer theory, as I construe it, marks the 'other' side of
politics . . . the 'side' outside all political sides, committed
as they are, on every side, to futurism's unquestioned good" (7).
This account of queer theory, even as construed by one theorist,
hardly seems like a "particular" story, not at least particular
enough. Queer theory, on this account, doesn't seem like an escape
from the political's claustrophobically refracted unavailing
sides, but a claustrophobia unto itself.[21 <#foot21>]
"If not this, what?"
39.
To return to the question Edelman raises, /if not this, what?/ The
structure of such a question importantly allows possible answers
beyond the foreclosing choices that queer theory, these past
decades, often has been asked to make. Mourning or melancholia?
Gay pride or queer shame? Utopic or nonutopic? Even as the
diacritical assertion of queer pessimism versus queer optimism
might seem yet another reductive binary, queer optimism, as an
answer to /if not this, what?/, first and foremost resists the
self-evidence of the diverse things this "what" /is/. For
instance, Butler reiterates in Giving an Account of Oneself what
she earlier maintains in The Psychic Life of Power as the ethical
value of "affirm[ing] what is contingent and incoherent in
oneself" (Giving an Account 41). It seems crucial, in affirming
what is incoherent in oneself, to understand likewise what is
/coherent/, and furthermore, crucial to have a vocabulary as
adequate to coherence as to coherence's disruption. Why take
coherence for granted? Why presume that coherence necessarily is
characterizable only in the attenuated, non-critical terms that
queer theory and other post-structuralist disciplines seek to
challenge? Dissatisfaction with a given regime of coherence might
sponsor a critical commitment to dismantling coherence /tout
court/. Such a dissatisfaction, however, might likewise
productively sponsor a reconfiguration of coherence--the
cultivation of a vocabulary of coherence that more precisely does
justice to the ways in which coherence /isn't/ expansively,
unilaterally destructive, reductive, or ideological.
40.
To imagine a reevaluation of something like personal coherence
/as/ a queer-optimistic project requires, as I have been arguing,
a reevaluation of optimism itself. Disdain for optimism as
commonly practiced or invoked might solicit optimism's wholesale
repudiation (a la Edelman)--or it might solicit optimism's own
redress. Optimism's queer contents seem inaccessible so long as
optimism is sustained /as/ futural, /as/ allergic to scrupulous
thinking. To more fully account for what in optimism heretofore
has seemed unthinkable, it seems useful to return to Leibniz,
insofar as Leibniz's thinking remains exemplary of the context in
which optimism is thought (or more to the point, not thought)
about. Here I only want to note where Leibnizian optimism departs
most starkly from my own essay's investigations. My critique of
Leibniz isn't incommensurate with my critique of queer theory. And
as this essay wishes already to have made clear, one of the ends
of reconceiving optimism /as/ an intellectual venture would be to
open the possibility of a criticism--even skepticism--that is
itself optimistically motivated. I conclude with an account of
Leibniz--and by extension, Leibnizian and non-Leibnizian
happiness--to suggest the penuries of our current repertoires of
optimism and happiness. /Again: what if these penuries compelled
us to think harder about optimism or happiness, rather than accept
their straw-figure hypostasizations as grounds for their dismissal
or too easy excoriation?/
41.
Before turning to what in Leibniz underwrites the modes of
optimism from which my own project diverges, I wish to note one
extraordinary way in which Leibnizian optimism itself differs from
the optimisms invoked by Berlant, Bersani, Edelman, or Warner.
Leibnizian optimism is /not/, in fact, oriented to the future.
Optimism, etymologically evoking one who hopes, might somehow have
come to name one strain of Leibniz's philosophy, but Leibniz's
writing--even when most resembling Panglossian caricature /of/
it--has nearly as little staked in hope or future as Edelman's
anti-optative No Future. In his 1686 Discourse on Metaphysics,
Leibniz delineates the tenets of what would later be described as
his optimism. "Therefore," Leibniz writes,
it is sufficient to have the confidence that God does
everything for the best and that nothing can harm those who
love him. But to know in detail the reasons that could have
moved him to choose this order of the universe--to allow sins,
to dispense his saving grace in a certain way--surpasses the
power of a finite mind, especially when it has not yet
attained the enjoyment of the vision of God. (38)
As Deleuze succinctly notes, "Leibniz's optimism is really
strange" (The Fold 68). Really strange, in that "miseries are not
what was missing; the best of all possibilities only blossoms amid
the ruins of Platonic Good. If this world exists, it is not
because it is the best, but because it is rather the inverse; it
is the best because it is, because it is the one that is. The
philosopher is still not the Inquisitor he will soon become with
empiricism . . . . He is a Lawyer, or God's attorney. He defends
God's Cause, following the word that Leibniz invents, 'theodicy'"
(68). That is, when Leibniz exhorts that we find all God's works
excellent and in complete conformity with what we might have
desired, he neither claims that any given work would seem
manifestly delightful, nor that our desires only retroactively
could be known.
42. Adjacent but by no means equivalent to Leibnizian tautology is a
more familiarly teleological model of wishful thinking, whereby
time could reveal the commensurability of God's work and our
desire. Leibniz, however, doesn't /need/ time to prove what faith
simply makes known,[22 <#foot22>] faith being that which posits
optimism not as practice but as given. Following Leibniz, a
struggle to remain optimistic in the face of calamity or distress
signals not a wavering of optimism, per se, but a wavering of
faith, whose digital robustness forecloses faith as analogic
sliding-scale. One believes or one does not, without gradation.
Similarly, either one is optimistic, or one is not. To struggle to
remain optimistic most reductively belies that one is /not/
optimistic, that one already has fallen from the logic by which
optimism is upheld. To believe absolutely in the goodness of God
makes optimism not a choice, or even an attitude, but that faith's
inevitable extension. Faith's capacity to convert all crises
(past, present, future) into manifestations of the good indicates
the extent to which Leibniz's theodicy is as imperializing as the
pessimisms of queer theory. That is, the /semper/ of Leibniz and
the /semper/ of Edelman seem equivalently suspect, even if
programatically opposed.
43. At the same time, however, this Leibnizian /semper/ is exactly
that which countermands any privileging of futurity. Faith
subordinates human experience of time (past, present, future) to a
divine temporality in which temporal distinctions all but vanish;
God already has orchestrated what /will/ happen no less than what
already /has/ happened. Leibniz writes thus:
The whole future is doubtless determined: but since we know
not what it is, nor what is foreseen or resolved, we must do
our duty, according to the reason that God has given us and
according to the rules that he has prescribed for us; and
therefore we must have a quiet mind, and leave to God himself
the care for the outcome. (Theodicy 154)
Humans perhaps equivocate, but Leibniz's God does not, and in the
fundamental non-equivocality of what divinely will happen, the
future consequently for all practical purposes lies beyond
engagement, revision, or hope--contrary the ways optimism, after
Leibniz, is not beyond hope but generated by it.
44. My turn from Leibniz, then, does not stem from his intense
valuation of futurity; optimism as valuation of futurity seems a
gross mischaracterization of both Leibniz's Discourse and his
Theodicy. Rather, queer optimism most significantly departs from
Leibniz in indirect (and perhaps counterintuitive) response to
Leibniz's radical /deflation/ of futurity. Leibnizian optimism
lies beyond theorization not because it consigns determination or
delight to a futural horizon, but because the faith that
underwrites it looms beyond interrogation. This brand of
optimistic unimpeachability characterizes both George W. Bush's
exasperating contumaciousness, as well as Howard Dean's infamously
Whitmanian barbaric yawp. The former is beyond theorization
because (among myriad less glib reasons) Bush is incapable of
theorizing; the latter, beyond theorization to the extent that
Dean's whoop came on the heels of defeat, what J.L. Austin might
characterize as an optimistic performative utterance executed
under infelicitous conditions. A person (e.g., George W. Bush)
might possess the faith that prosthetically would make credible
(which is to say, make credibly existent) the divinely infinite
logic which to his finite mind is otherwise incomprehensible, or
he might not. The optimism that this essay introduces, it nearly
goes without saying, is not predicated on faith, at very least
because concertedly wary of the seductions of absolutes over the
comparably vulnerable values of particularity. I raise the
examples of Bush and Dean to note the ways in which optimism
already saturates the political field, both making and breaking
presidential campaigns, initiating and sustaining otherwise
untenable-seeming policies and positions (not to mention wars).
Optimism's political power (if not eloquence) makes its critical
re-examination--as opposed to its critical eschewal--all the more
timely, and crucial.
45. Like optimism's iron fist, Leibnizian happiness is chronic and
beyond question, even as the means of this interminable happiness
are in a secular register altogether unavailable. Leibnizian
optimism purports a structure in which non-happiness might arise
as an erosion of faith, as an erosion, that is, of a happiness
that is otherwise structurally inescapable. I find the possible
ordeal of inescapable happiness fascinating, in part because such
an understanding so extravagantly revises how happiness ordinarily
is considered. If optimism eludes or renders gratuitous
theorization via a tautology (Deleuze's "it is the one that is")
that fashions optimism as conceptually expansive and indelible as
the world itself, happiness--plain old happy, not Leibniz's
mega-happy--oppositely eludes theorization because so transient.
Non-Leibnizian happiness isn't inextricable from structure (for
instance, Leibnizian faith) but more precisely experienced as a
disruption /of/ structure.
46.
To speak of optimism's relation to the timely likewise is to speak
of optimism's strenuous and strange relation to time. In Leibniz,
a finite mind could come (if at best asymptotically) closest to
accessing infinite knowledge through the exercise of an intense
patience by which future events could make sense of past ones. The
optimism of my study isn't interested in the capacity of time to
render the meaning of apparently terrible circumstances
felicitous. My project more fundamentally challenges the temporal
narratives to which both (Leibnizian) optimistic happiness and
non-optimistic happiness ordinarily are subjected. For instance:
Leibnizian happiness is chronic and beyond question, but the means
of this durability are in a secular domain altogether unavailable.
Leibnizian optimism imagines a structure in which nonhappiness
might erupt as a wavering of faith, as a wavering, that is, of a
happiness that is otherwise structurally inescapable. On the
contrary, non-Leibnizian happiness (as vernacularly understood)
isn't inextricable from a structure (for instance, the strong
theory of faith), but is more acutely experienced as a disruption
/of/ structure.
47.
The psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear describes happiness as disruption
in his account not of Leibniz, but of Aristotle:
If contemplation were a state that one could achieve and
sustain indefinitely and unproblematically, then Aristotle
would have been led to feel discontent within it--and he would
start to fantasize a /real/ happiness which lies just outside.
(50)
Continuing his discussion of contemplation, for Aristotle, as a
site of happiness happier than that derived from living ethically,
Lear observes that "those few who do manage to find time to
contemplate will experience that time as precious and short-lived"
(50). The supreme happiness afforded by contemplation, that is,
lies outside the realm of ethics. This moment in which
contemplation occurs is "precious and short-lived." In the
Leibnizian model, happiness is the structure from which one falls.
In the Aristotelian model, happiness lies outside of structure.
Indeed, in Lear's work, happiness more closely resembles the death
drive (in its disruption of life-as-lived) than it does the
pleasure principle (despite happiness' quotidian imbrications with
pleasure), whose status as principle Lear finds antithetical to
happiness' propensity to disrupt principles as such:
Here we need to go back to an older English usage of
"happiness" in terms of happenstance: the experience of chance
things' working out well rather than badly. Happiness, in this
interpretation, is . . . a lucky break . . . . If one thinks
about it, I think one will see that in such fleeting moments
we do find real happiness. (129)
Despite Lear's chiasmatic invoking of thinking, it seems unclear
how such constitutively fleeting happiness could be thought about.
One could recollect it, but could one articulate it beyond the
fact that it feels good, quickly? Or that it feels so different
from the rest of life that it approaches something like death? As
Lear writes, "the fantasy of a happy life becomes tinged with the
suggestion of a life beyond life--a certain kind of living death"
(27). It is not surprising, given this claim, that Lear finally
opines that "there are certain structural similarities between
Aristotle's treatment of happiness and Freud's treatment of death.
Happiness and death are each invoked as the purported aim of all
striving" (98). The difficulty of really thinking about happiness
(as opposed to the ease of thinking that real happiness arrives
fleetingly) is, I think, a function of its putative fleetingness.
Were one able to articulate happiness more thoroughly, or even
imagine it as less fleeting, would it seem as authentically happy?
48.
Queer optimism involves a kind of thought-experiment. What if
happiness could outlast fleeting moments, without that persistence
attenuating the quality of happiness? What if, instead of
attenuating happiness, this extension of happiness opened it up to
critical investigations that didn't /a priori/ doubt it, but
instead made happiness complicated, and strange? If the insights
of the past few decades could newly mobilize shame, shattering, or
melancholy as /interesting/, as opposed to merely seeming
instances of fear and trembling; what if we could learn from those
insights and critical practices, and imagine happiness as
theoretically mobilizable, and conceptually difficult? Which is to
ask, what if happiness weren't merely, self-reflexively /happy/,
but interesting? Queer optimism cannot guarantee what such a
happiness would look like, how such a happiness would feel. And
while it does not promise a road to an Emerald City, queer
optimism avails a new terrain of critical inquiry, which, surely,
is a significant felicity in its own right.
/ English Department
Mount Holyoke College
msnedike@mtholyoke.edu
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. I offer this anecdote to suggest the difficulty of
sequestering feelings from metafeelings. Or to conjure Isabel
Archer or Maggie Verver, the frustrating and exhilarating
perviousness of thinking and living. I'm not telling this
particular story as a retreat from the discursive or critical, but
to note the strangeness of having felt like an allegory for my own
subsequent academic work. Why did sadness feel indomitable? Why
did happiness, in comparison, seem to offer so impoverished and
ineloquent a vocabulary?
2 <#ref2>. What Butler openly invokes as "connection"--implying
connection between others on political, erotic, and any number of
less recognizably charged registers--returns, more recently, in
Lauren Berlant's invoking of "/collective attachment/." I wish to
juxtapose Butler's emphasis on "incoherence" with Berlant's
emphasis on attachment itself. "I propose," Berlant writes, "that
we turn optimism itself into a topic probably best phrased as
/collective attachment/. Optimism is a way of describing a certain
futurism that implies continuity with the present" ("Critical
Inquiry" 449). I continue to be grateful for Berlant's insistence
on returning the term "optimism" to the critical field.
3 <#ref3>. For other references to congealment in Butler's
writing, see Gender Trouble, xii and 43, as well as Bodies that
Matter, 244.
4 <#ref4>. "Spawn," with its suggestion of mass hatchings of
creatures, arguably resonates within the same implicit
science-fictional register as "congealment."
5 <#ref5>. Bersani's account of a person's hardwiring for
destructiveness, "something as species-specific as the human
aptitude for verbal language" (126-27), indulges a fantasy of
primordiality that recalls and arguably is indebted to Foucault's
account of disciplinary subjectivity, even as the former's
insistence on a radical interiority starkly departs from the
emphatically non-psychologizing dermal attentions of the latter.
See Foucault, Discipline & Punish 153.
6 <#ref6>. "The centrality of redemptive and therapy cultures to
the promise of love's formalized satisfactions means that where
love provides the dominant rhetoric and form of attachment, so a
discussion of pedagogy must be. Popular discourses that merge
scientific expertise with a putatively general desire for better
techniques of the self--as we see in talk shows, self-help books,
and twelve-step semipublics--provide maps for people to clutch in
their hands so that they can revisit the unzoned affective domain
of which love is the pleasant and thinkable version. In these
contexts love--never fully secularized--is the church of optimism
for the overwhelmed. The currency that pays the price of entrance
is the loss of everything except optimism" (Berlant, "Love, a
Queer Feeling" 441).
7 <#ref7>. See, for instance, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis
and Art 38-40.
8 <#ref8>. For other queer-theoretical texts less thinkable
without the preceding work of Butler or Bersani, see Tim Dean's
Beyond Sexuality; David L. Eng's and David Kazanjian's edited
collection, Loss, for which Judith Butler writes an afterword;
Diana Fuss's Identification Papers; Ann Cvetkovich's An Archive of
Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures; Teresa
de Lauretis's The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse
Desire, whose first chapter takes as epigraph one of Bersani's
articulations on Freudian desire; Brett Farmer's Spectacular
Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships; Didier
Eribon's Insult and the Making of the Gay Self; Esther
Sánchez-Pardo's Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and
Modernist Melancholia; Jeffrey T. Nealon's Alterity Politics:
Ethics and Performative Subjectivity; José Muñoz's
Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of
Politics. The above list, neither alphabetical nor chronological,
intends only to suggest the iceberg's tip; the single essays
written under the influence of Bersani or Butler are nearly
countless. Butler and Bersani have proliferated and inspired a
kind of critical mass, such that my essay positions itself not
just in relation to the work of two scholars (or three, or four),
but in relation to the veritable queer cottage-industry that these
scholars have engendered.
9 <#ref9>. See, for instance, Judith Butler's trenchant analysis
of hate speech in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative, and more recently her critique of post-9/11 politics
in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
10 <#ref10>. Curious how both Loss and An Archive of Feelings seek
to depathologize their respective melancholia and trauma, as
though these books weren't being published at a time when
pathologization itself seemed critically so far afield; as though,
if not post-Butler or Bersani, then post-Oprah, melancholia and
trauma hadn't themselves long-trafficked in nonpathological,
celebrity-like circuits.
11 <#ref11>. Regarding these "countless other thinkers," I think,
for instance, of Michael Moon, Biddy Martin, Jane Gallop, Lauren
Berlant, Henry Abelove, and of course, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to
whom this section returns.
12 <#ref12>. For a lucid critique of the hermeneutics of suspicion
along Laplanchian lines, see Tim Dean's recent "Art as Symptom:
Zizek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism."
13 <#ref13>. Think, for instance, of Thomas Gray's paradigmatic
"Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College":
Yet, ah! why should they know their fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more;--where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.
14 <#ref14>. "Shame is the affect that mantles the threshold
between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and
theatricality, between performativity and--performativity"
(Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 38).
15 <#ref15>. Whereas Sedgwick celebrates shame's blossoming
between otherwise ossified formulations of selves (for instance,
between the Henry James of 1875 and the Henry James of 1907),
Giorgio Agamben, in a recent essay titled "Shame, or On the
Subject" notes, following Levinas, that "shame is grounded in our
being's incapacity to move away and break from itself" (Remnants
104-05). "In shame," Agamben writes, "we are consigned to
something from which we cannot in any way distance ourselves"
(105). From this opposite beginning, and in the radically
different (which is to say, most accurately, literal) context of
the book's titular Auschwitz, Agamben nonetheless reaches a
conclusion that is nearly identical to Sedgwick's. "It is now
possible to clarify," Agamben writes, "the sense in which shame is
truly something like the hidden structure of all subjectivity and
consciousness" (128). I juxtapose Sedgwick's account of shame with
Agamben's as a way of illustrating the persuasiveness of shame, as
a trope, beyond the essay's immediate queer purlieu. If Sedgwick
will eventually make a claim for shame that universalizes its
relation to queers, Agamben goes one step further, extending his
reading of shame within Primo Levi's The Reawakening to pertain to
everyone. I introduce Agamben to recall the fact that queer
theory's energies are not necessarily constitutively different
from theories of /people/ as such; and as often, are mutually
informing.
16 <#ref16>. See Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions
in Man and Animals and Mark Hansen's New Philosophy for New Media.
17 <#ref17>. Laplanche situates his theorization of the enigmatic
signifier in the context of the primal scene. Without speculating
on any possible primal scene or scenes in the genesis of queer
theory, I find heuristically valuable Laplanche's account of an
enigmatic signifier's simultaneous transmittability and
nonintelligibility: the absorption and circulation of a message's
form, irrespective of recognition of message's content. Laplanche
writes,
The primal scene conveys messages. It is traumatising only
because it proffers, indeed imposes its enigmas, which
compromise the spectacle addressed to the child. I certainly
have no wish to make an inventory of these messages, for there
are, in my sense no objective enigmas: the only enigmas that
exist are ones that are proffered, and that reduplicate in one
way or another the relationship that the sender of the message
has with his own unconscious. (170-71)
In suggesting the circulation of something like melancholy from
one theoretical text to another, I imagine Butler (or Bersani) not
as "the sender[s] of the message," but rather as themselves
recipients of an enigma antecedent to their own work.
18 <#ref18>. The interminable gadflying of No Future itself
constitutes a peculiar and peculiarly capacious generosity,
insofar as it is near impossible not to feel something toward
Edelman's work. How not to be grateful for a book that solicits
intense feeling from nearly anyone who reads it?
I balk, for instance, at the possibility of a revamped queer
ethics predicated on "the corrosive force of irony" (No Future
23), predicated on the slap-happy eschewal of The Child, as though
there were only one ideological Child. As though there weren't
within cultural discourse (not just the specter, but) the tenable,
exquisitely precocious, touched and touching figure of a Queer
Child. "The cult of the Child," Edelman writes, "permits no
shrines to the queerness of boys and girls, since queerness . . .
is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end" (19).
Such claims seem so patently misguided and foreclosing that it's
difficult to know how to respond, beyond the obvious fact that
/there's nothing queerer than childhood/: c.f. Henry James's
Maisie, or JonBenet Ramsey, or "Ma Vie en Rose's" Ludovic, or my
own childhood home videos, which motivate in me a certain pathos
not because childhood ends where queerness begins, but because my
own queerness, as I bat my seahorse eyelashes or wander through
leaf-piles, is so effusively, if confusedly, in full-gear. Were
one to claim that Edelman's hypostasizations of the Child seem to
do more harm than good, Edelman, impeccably, might say, /of
course/, more harm than good. In fact (of course), Edelman already
says as much:
The queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us
from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of /knowing/
ourselves and hence of /knowing/ our "good." Such queerness
proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call
"better," though it promises, in more than one sense of the
phrase, absolutely nothing. (5)
I have written this essay for those wanting ("in more than one
sense of the phrase") something "better" than "nothing."
To be sure, I'm not the only scholar rankled by Edelman's immodest
proposals. In the introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of
Children, Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley similarly question
Edelman's preemptive inscription of the Child into a predetermined
ideological matrix: "What is the effect," Bruhm and Hurley write,
"of projecting the child into a heteronormative future? One effect
is that we accept the teleology of the child . . . as
heterosexually determined" (Curiouser, xiv). Curiouser's essays
importantly challenge simplifying or evacuating narratives of
childhood sexuality, rescuing children from hypostasized forms of
innocence. My own project, on the other hand, seeks to rescue (not
children, but) /optimism from innocence/. Thus, one way of
distinguishing my ambitions from those of Bruhm and Hurley is that
the latter engage Edelman on the level of No Future's subject (the
child, or more precisely, the child-under-erasure), whereas I take
Edelman's subject as symptomatic of the book's methodology, as
such. Differently put, Bruhm and Hurley, along with Edelman,
presume within a given cultural archive innocence's epistemic
force. If this innocence is linked to a sort of optimism
(specifically, for these scholars, through children such as Ragged
Dick, Heidi, Pollyanna, etc.), I'm interested in the ways that
optimism, within an intellectual archive, hasn't been
hegemonically organizing, so much as a priori ineffectual and
depleted.
On a different register, Susan Fraiman interestingly challenges
the foreclosure, in No Future, of a queer pregnant body. Fraiman
writes at the close of her book Cool Men and the Second Sex,
My interest here is not in the merits of campaigns for gay
"normalization" and marriage rights but rather in Edelman's
suppression of procreative queerness even as he brings up
lesbian and gay parenting. By tying this firmly and
exclusively to /adoption/, Edelman keeps the category of
queerness apart from the feminized, reproductive body, which
is imagined as scarcely any closer or more familiar than China
or Guatemala. (133)
Fraiman's interceding is timely (and not just because the
pregnancy of Katie Holmes has brought home to all checkout-aisle
tabloid-readers how utterly queer pregnancy itself can be)--albeit
the queer /unheimlich/ of pregnancy has been available for
scrutiny, at very least, since Sigourney Weaver's Ripley. Neither
my interest nor Fraiman's, however, is in a pregnancy that could
assert its queerness only along these limited, science-fiction (or
Scientological) lines. Rather, I admire Fraiman's appraisal of
Edelman for its vision of queer theory that could accommodate (and
not merely chide) the complicated lexicons of maternal affect.
Here, again, I would invoke Winnicott, whose own meticulous and
insightful theorizations of maternity salubriously supplement
those enabled by Fraiman's work, or (psychoanalytically) the work
of Melanie Klein.
19 <#ref19>. The argument (if not the polemical affect) of
Edelman's recent study implicitly suggests various moments in
Bersani's corpus, but more explicitly recalls an earlier
proposition made by Peggy Phelan, in her 1995 essay, "Dying Man
with a Movie Camera, Silverlake Life." Phelan writes thus:
Let's suppose that lesbians and gay men in the academies and
institutions of the contemporary United States have a
particularly potent relation to grief. Exiled from the Law of
the Social, many gay men and lesbians may have introjected the
passionate hatred of mainstream homophobia and taken up an
embattled, aggressive, and complex relation to the death
drive. The aggressivity of this relation, the theory goes,
makes it possible for us to survive our (first) deaths. While
we wait for the next, we perform queer acts. (380)
Such "queer acts," folded back into Edelman's No Future, would
entail acting as though there were no future, executing actions
directly (if not solely) motivated by the death drive. Phelan's
essay, meditating on the utterly harrowing documentary,
"Silverlake Life," is itself harrowing in the austere deference
with which Phelan approaches her topic.
20 <#ref20>. There isn't space in this essay to do justice to
Edelman's complicated and saponifying rhetoric of embodiment and
figuration.
21 <#ref21>. This claustrophobia might account, in part, for the
ellipses that conclude /No Future/'s second epigraph, by Virginia
Woolf. "Yes, I was thinking: we live without a future. That's
whats queer...." One could variously speculate how Woolf's "queer"
differs from Edelman's, when Woolf continues, beyond Edelman's
ellipses: "That's whats [sic] queer, with our noses pressed to a
closed door" (355).
22 <#ref22>. "I hold, therefore, that, according to these
principles, in order to act in accordance with the love of God, it
is not sufficient to force ourselves to be patient; rather, we
must truly be satisfied with everything that has come to us
according to his will" (Leibniz, "Discourse on Metaphysics"
37-38). If optimism is difficult to cultivate, this is because a
person can never know as much as God does. Leibniz's conception of
God, in this respect, is analogous to Freud's conception of an
unconscious. Both God and the unconscious delineate what a person
at any given moment cannot know. Several years later after
Leibniz's writing, in response to Hobbes's condemnations of
humanity, Shaftesbury appositely describes an epistemological
predicament which Leibnizian optimism would innoculate altogether,
or which something like psychoanalysis might take as point of
departure. "In an infinity of things, mutually relative, a mind
which sees not infinitely can see nothing fully, and must
therefore frequently see that as imperfect which in itself is
really perfect" (The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody, qtd. in
Tsanoff 113).
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