| Popis: |
Resonating with early queer theory's motifs such as appropriation, Lee Edelman's No Future or its central theme, queer negativity, has received not only applause but also fair criticism, and thereby occupied one of the central positions in recent queer theory. In response to such criticism, Edelman clarifies that the negativity he proposes should not be equated with the simple negation of particular political positions, and its refusal of “positive identity” should rather be directed to the identity principle on which our whole society rests. Although such a radical challenge to positive identity cannot be underestimated, we might question whether such a drive-like, amorphous queer resistance tacitly preserves or rehabilitates the positive identity it purports to negate. It should also be asked how, while criticizing such an insidious risk, we can reframe queer negativity. In order to answer these questions, this paper firstly examines the similarities between the argument of queer negativity and that of French feminist theory, focusing on the concept of improper subject; both arguments, relying on Lacanian psychoanalysis, insist on dis (ap) propriation of identity. After demonstrating their connection, the second section of this paper explores the criticism offered by Gayatri C. Spivak of such insistence on the divided subject, and, by doing so, marks the risk that the argument of queer negativity might entail. This section first considers her criticism against Jacqueline Rose. Based on Derridean affirmative deconstruction and his use of catachresis, Spivak proposes to understand the subjectivity of the decentered subject not as a privileged right but as “a bind to be watched”. She also warns against Rose’s reduction of the difference between the ontico-epistemological subject and the ethicopolitical subject. Through a reading of such criticism, this paper suggests that an argument like that of Rose implicitly obliterates the trace of the wholly-other, which is only noticeable by attending to the catachresis “woman”, and that it reintroduces the sovereign subject. The latter part of the second section connects such metaphysical arguments with the political analysis also made by Spivak. This part explores the criticism against Foucault / Deleuze, focusing on (A) the status of the “desire” as catachresis and (B) the inattention to the gap between descriptive representation and political representation, which can be respectively compared with (A’) the status of the catachresis “woman” and (B’) the reduction of the difference between the ontico-epistemological subject and the ethicopolitical subject. The inattention to the gap between Darstellung and Vertrerung leads to, according to Spivak, the perpetuation of bourgeois ideology. Functioning with that kind of ideology, the confusion of the desire of the empirical instance with that of the transcendental instance rehabilitates the S / subject and implicitly preserves the transparent subject of the theorists. This paper, based on the similarities between the argument of queer negativity and that of the French feminist theory demonstrated earlier, lastly directs the criticism on French theory offered by Spivak to the argument of queer negativity. It concludes that queer negativity is to be “watched” in order to affirm the radical negativity of the other. |
