Echoes of a

Queer Messianic
SERIES EDITORS

David E. Johnson (Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo)

Scott Michaelsen (English, Michigan State University)

SERIES ADVISORY BOARD

Nahum D. Chandler, African American Studies, University of California, Irvine

Rebecca Comay, Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Marc Crépon, Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris
Jonathan Culler, Comparative Literature, Cornell University
Johanna Drucker, Design Media Arts and Information Studies, UCLA
Christopher Fynsk, Modern Thought, Aberdeen University
Rodolphe Gasché, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
Martin Hägglund, Comparative Literature, Yale University
Carol Jacobs, Comparative Literature and German, Yale University
Peggy Kamuf, French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California
David Marriott, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz
Steven Miller, English, University at Buffalo
Alberto Moreiras, Hispanic Studies, Texas A&M University
Patrick O’Donnell, English, Michigan State University
Pablo Oyarzún, Teoría del Arte, Universidad de Chile
Scott Cutler Shershow, English, University of California, Davis
 Echoes of a
Queer Messianic
From Frankenstein to Brokeback Mountain

Richard O. Block
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2018 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Block, Richard O. author.

Title: Echoes of a queer messianic : from Frankenstein to Brokeback mountain /
Richard O. Block.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2018. | Series:
SUNY series, literature . . . in theory | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017027539 (print) | LCCN 2017040527 (ebook) | ISBN
9781438469560 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438469553 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Homosexuality in literature. | Homosexuality and literature. |
Monsters in literature.
Classification: LCC PN56.H57 (ebook) | LCC PN56.H57 B56 2017 (print) | DDC
809/.8920664—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027539

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Mary Ellen Shannon
Solely for the sake of the hopeless is hope given us.
—Walter Benjamin
 Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction xiii

Chapter 1
A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1

Chapter 2
Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story or the Genesis of a
Queer Jewish Outlaw 29

Chapter 3
Queer Prosthetics or Male Tribadism in Kleist’s “On the
Puppet Theater” 55

Chapter 4
Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces: Roland Barthes’s
A Lover’s Discourse and Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther 77

Chapter 5
“I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.”: Echoes of a Queer Messianic in
Brokeback Mountain 101

Notes 125

Bibliography 143

Index 153
 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Walter Simpson Center for the Humanities and
the Althea B. Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, both at the University of
Washington, for their help and support during the years. Individuals are
many, so I simply list them: Leandro di Prinzio, Elizabeth Cnobloch, Michael
DuPlessis, Karen Pinkus, Peter Fenves, Liliane Weissberg, Simon Richter,
Robert Tobin, Kwame Holman, Japhet Johnstone, Lena Heilmann, Alice
Bloch, Davide Stimilli, Duane Perolio, Chris Elam, Roy Vargason, Richard
Pucko, Gayle Jessup White, Ann DeLancey, Ann Collier, Luciana Pignatelli,
Roberto Orazi, Celia Baker, Robert Block, Kathy Dougherty, Edward Bloch,
Ellen Rosenberg, Jay Wolke, Avril Greenberg, and Barbara von Mólnar.

Earlier versions of the following chapters appeared as follows:

“Queering the Jew who would be German.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic

Studies 40, no. 2 (2004), 93–110. Portions reprinted with permission
of University of Toronto Press. © U of Toronto P.
“Textual Narcissism: Undoing Queer Readings in Kleist’s ‘Über das Mari-
onettentheater,’ ” in The Self as Muse: Narcissism and Creativity in the
German Imagination, 1750–1830, ed. Alex Mathäs (Lewisburg: Bucknell
UP, 2011), 171–194.
“ ‘I’ll Love You Forever, Wilhelm.’ Queer Echoes in Roland Barthes’ Reading
of Goethe’s ‘Werther’ and Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same.”
Literatur für Leser 10, no. 3 (2011), 147–165.
“ ‘I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere’: Echoes of Queer Messianism in Brokeback
Mountain.” The New Centennial Review 9, no. 1 (2009), 253–278.
© Michigan State UP.

xi
 Introduction

“Death in Venice”: Some Indices of the Messianic

As a dying Gustav Aschenbach settles a final time into his “sdraio” or

chaise upon the mostly deserted beach of Venice, Tadzio appears to signal
him. Aschenbach’s last breaths, his final but feckless attempt to grasp the
image of the beloved, all respond to the enigmatic but irresistible gesture
that points beyond, to something on the other side of consciousness, even
perhaps to a love redeemed, somewhere, someplace, somehow in the future.
Given the importance of the following passage for this project, I quote it
at some length. The purpose here is to read these final scenes as opening
onto a possibility that is neither fully articulated nor foreclosed. At the same
time, I am arguing that the plague and Aschenbach’s passion are inextricably
linked, even indistinguishable. And it is this convergence of disease and
passion, as it points to something beyond the tragic fate of its victim, that
is a central concern of this book. Working through the implications of this
passage, which will take some time, will also serve as an example of how
messianic echoes are pursued in the chapters to follow.

Now, he paused again with his face turned seaward, and next
began to move slowly leftwards along the narrow strip of sand
the sea left bare. He paced there, divided by an expanse of water
from the shore . . . a remote and isolated figure, (verbindungslos)
with floating locks, out there in the sea and wind, against the
misty inane. . . .With a sudden recollected impulse, he turned
from the waist up, in an exquisite movement, one hand rest-
ing on his hip, and looked over his shoulder at the shore.
[Aschenbach] . . . lifted his head, as it were, to answer Tadzio’s
gaze. . . . It seemed to him the pale and lovely summoner out

xiii
xiv Introduction

there smiled at him and beckoned; as though . . . he pointed

outward . . . into an immensity of richest expectation. And, as
so often before, [Aschenbach] rose to follow. (Mann 74–75)

Who is this Aschenbach, abject and alone, squandering his final

breaths in a series of hapless gestures as he beholds the magnificence of
a figure framed by the endless, boundless sea? The trajectory of Eros has
not lead Aschenbach to the union of truth and love anticipated by Plato,
but rather to a “pernicious intoxication” (Mann 73), a floundering toward
an abyss that was never far away for the bourgeois artist now enraptured
by an impossible and even scurrilous desire. To touch or address or even
approach this magnificent, prepubescent embodiment of classical perfection
would defile such beauty, blaspheme it. Preserving but never possessing that
love has driven Aschenbach through the hidden and dirty passageways of
Venice, as he tries to keep in and out of touch with Tadzio. Simultaneous
with this game of hide-and-seek is Aschenbach’s attempt to track rumors of
a plague and its cover-up. The apparent origins of the plague are as mythical
and sinister as Tadzio’s appeal is erotic and irresistible:

For the past several years Asiatic cholera had shown a strong
tendency to spread. Its source was the hot, moist swamps of the
delta of the Ganges, where it bred in the mephitic air of that
primeval island-jungle, among whose bamboo thickets the tiger
crouches, where life of every sort flourishes in rank abundance,

Figure I.1: “He paced there, divided by an expanse of water from the shore . . . out
there in the sea and the wind, against the misty inane.”
 Introduction xv

and only man avoids the spot. Thence, the pestilence had spread
throughout Hindustan, raging with great violence; it brought
terror to Astrakhan, terror even to Moscow. (Mann 63)

The confirmation of his greatest fears, the relentless march of a disease that
emanates from where no person dare visit, could just as easily describe the
morass that engulfs him, as he tries to explore without exposing himself to
the voracious desire that keeps him in pursuit of his beloved. “He was not
feeling well and had to struggle against spells of giddiness only half physical
in their nature, accompanied by a swiftly mounting dread, a sense of futility
and hopelessness—but whether this referred to himself or to the outer world
he could not tell” (Mann 73). The hallucinatory effects of the plague thus
derive from its origins and situate it outside the fertile grounds and classical
skies of ancient Greece. Aschenbach has gone too far. Or his lust has taken
him too far. The question now arises whether Aschenbach is in pursuit of
the plague or is the plague in pursuit of Aschenbach? “And yet our solitary
felt he had a sort of first claim on a share in the unwholesome secret; he
took a fantastic satisfaction in putting leading questions to such persons as
were interested to conceal it, and forcing them to explicit untruths by way
of denial” (Mann 57). The secret in this instance is the plague, but the
description equally resonates with exploration of closeted desires. “It [the
plague] ought to be kept quiet,’ he thought, aroused. ‘It should not be talked
about’ ” (Mann 53). In this instance the convergence of the plague with
illicit desire is unmistakable. Lastly, note how the plague’s renewed strength
mirrors the heightening of Aschenbach’s passion. His questionable source,
a British travel agent, seems all too capable of embellishment well attuned
to Aschenbach’s fears and passions: “Yes, the disease seemed to flourish and
wax strong, to redouble its generative powers . . . For the onslaught was
of the extremest violence, and not infrequently of the ‘dry’ type, the most
malignant form of the contagion” (Mann 63–64).
Aschenbach is not just exposed to this diseased passion but is in fact
a carrier of it. The plague, fortified by its bond with illicit passion, carries
as much of a malignant risk for the narrator as it does for Aschenbach.
Submerged in a miasma of his own making, Aschenbach no longer curries
the narrator’s favor. On the contrary, the narrator evinces repulsion to the
point of a virtual excommunication from the graces or sympathies of West-
ern civilization. As Eros draws him closer and closer to the precipice (“So
they too [the passions], they too lead him to the bottomless pit”; Mann
73), the narrator gradually withdraws, finally expressing absolute rejection
xvi Introduction

of Aschenbach, when the latter finds himself enraptured by the plague that
his forbidden passion self-generated:

Too late! He thought at that moment. Too late! But was it too
late? This step that he failed to take would very possibly have
been all to the good, it might have had a lightening, gladdening
effect, led perhaps to a wholesome disenchantment. But the fact
now seemed to be that the aging lover no longer wished to be
disenchanted, the intoxication was too precious to him. (Mann 47)

For Dorritt Cohn the passage signals a definitive turn by a narrator no longer
willing to indulge Aschenbach’s sordid descent in quest of physical beauty.
Aschenbach’s indisposition to “self-criticism” requires the narrator to abandon
him (Mann 143–45). In other words, Aschenbach needs to be quarantined.
The final sentence of the novella seems to confirm the narrator’s full
reversal. “Before midnight, a shocked and respectful public would receive
news of his decease” (Mann 75). In contrast to the unbridled outpouring of
passion evinced by Aschenbach, the narrator and the world maintain their
dignity with a properly restrained expression of sympathy. But is that really all
there is? Does something else not unhinge the narrator? The first description
offered above described Tadzio as isolated and without ties (verbindungslos),
when he gestures to Aschenbach. On the one hand, his beauty is not defiled
or compromised, at least in this moment, by any earthly consideration. On
the other, does he perhaps gesture toward the possibility of a world without
ties or restrictions, one whose entry is barred, i.e., the narrator with his/
her ties to respectable society? Initially, it is barred to Aschenbach as well.
Perhaps, there is no crossing that threshold. Aschenbach is thus tethered
to the structures of respectable society that both produce and condemn
his quest to capture the sensual in art. His final monologue, bemoaning
the fate of the artist hopelessly condemned to pursue damnation, becomes
then his recognition of the tentacles of respectable society and their reach
in determining the acceptable limits of love. “His [final] monologue takes
on the meaning of an anagnorisis, the expression of that lethal knowledge
the hero of Greek tragedy reaches when he stands on the verge of death”
(Cohn 144). Left unanswered is how such recognition informs his final gaze
through love-sick eyes at the forbidden.
The narrator’s pleasure in telling the story of a man fallen from grace
has more than the casual hint of a pleasurable sadism, not far removed from
the Schadenfreude of his friends back home when his late work is met with
 Introduction xvii

rejection.1 Upon landing in Venice, Aschenbach is plagued by a group of

Polish “ragazzi” on vacation; their source of greatest displeasure comes in
the figure of an old and pathetic fop who appears suspiciously out of place
among so many young men. “Aschenbach was moved to shudder as he
watched the creature and his association with the rest of the group. Could
they not see that he was old, that he had no right to wear the clothes they
wore or pretend to be one of them?” (Mann 17). Indeed, there is much that
is vulgar or “gemein” about the fop’s eventual drunkenness, as he tries to
find a way to ingratiate himself with the virile lads surrounding him. What
most disturbs Aschenbach is the premonition that he will suffer a similar
humiliation, that those dark forces of Eros will entrap him in an affair as
ridiculous and crude. Little recasting of the citation above is required to
turn the disdain on Aschenbach, particularly as he frantically pursues the
plague, while his makeup and hair dye peel away and with them any veneer
of respectability (Mann 69–70). In this instance, the fop staggers from side
to side, but however ridiculous he may appear, the fop has the last laugh.
“Give it (dem Liebchen) our love, will you, the p-pretty little dear” (Mann
17). The fop knows all about Aschenbach; he knows Aschenbach’s story
and what he will have been up to. And so the novella unfolds the history
of the fop’s double, Aschenbach, and his willingness to disgrace himself, to
invent and infect himself with the plague so as to preserve but demonstrate
an unconditional love for an impossible subject.
Moreover, the fop’s bitchiness resonates with the exasperation of the
narrator when he/she finally abandons Aschenbach: “Too Late! Too Late!”
Aschenbach sighs, as once again he is swept away by Tadizo, or as the fop
prefers, “the p-pretty little dear.” Just as the fop knows that it is too late
for Aschenbach (the two are brothers of a sort), the narrator questions
Aschenbach’s resignation: “But was it too late? [. . .] [T]he truth might have
been that the aging man did not want to be cured, that his illusion was far
too dear for him” (Mann 47). The text’s pleasure, if I can put it that way,
in placing Aschenbach at the mercy of respectable society in the form of a
judgmental narrator accommodates easily the darker pleasures Aschenbach
seeks. That is—and now we begin to understand just how shaken but per-
haps secretly delighted the world was by Aschenbach’s fall—love’s passion
is fueled by the sadistic pleasure the narrator derives in watching culture’s
one-time darling disgrace himself. The humiliation and dejection that drove
Aschenbach to Venice, that masochistic urge for perfection met now with
rejection and scorn by a once-adoring public, pushes him over the abyss.
“I go. You stay . . .” (Mann 47).
xviii Introduction

Figure I.2: “Could they not see that he was old, that he had no right to wear the
clothes he wore or pretend to be one of them.”

The narrator, however, does not have the last word. As Cohn points
out, the narrator protests too much; an unclaimed space or position is
opened up by the gap between the narrator’s indictment of Aschenbach
and the text’s ultimate position(s) vis-à-vis its protagonist. In other words,
a space emerges between the narrator and Aschenbach, not because the
narrator’s disdain registers the text’s condemnation of Aschenbach’s moral
failure, but rather because the narrator’s own intractable morality creates
a textual blind spot or no-man’s land that beckons to Aschenbach: “I go.
You stay.” Is he returning to a place as inhospitable to polite society as the
miasmic origins of the plague? And what possibilities for a different moral
order, a different kind of love, might be bred from diseased origins? Or to
pose a question asked by others: “Is not art, which so peremptorily dismisses
‘sympathy with the abyss,’ incomplete?” (Pike 120–41).
Possible answers to such question take us back to Tadzio’s pose and
enigmatic gesture that draw from Aschenbach his last breaths. “It seemed
to him the pale and lovely summoner out there smiled at him and beck-
oned; as though . . . he pointed outward . . . into an immensity of richest
expectation” (Mann75). What does it mean to follow that gesture, where
might it lead, what potentialities remain unrealized or beckon with mes-
sianic hope? Luchino Visconti’s film of Mann’s novella in 1971 offers some
profound clues to what this other moral order, or rather, amoral order might
promise in terms of love. For one, whatever distancing devices and tropes
employed by the narrator hardly function in the same fashion as they do in
the film. Mahler’s stirring adagietto from the fifth symphony attracts rather
 Introduction xix

than repels, invites spectators to follow Aschenbach to the abyss. The free,
indirect discourse of the novella always held out the possibility that the
narrator could just pick up and leave, drop in a few quotation marks and
return to a language separate and ethically barred from the pleasures of a
dissolute and dying man. But if Aschenbach’s final monologue no longer
carries credibility for the narrator, do the attachments summoned by the
music of the film draw Aschenbach so completely outside the moral purview
of any respectable person that the narrator’s retreat in the novella marks less
an unwillingness than an incapability to follow Aschenbach?2
Like the origins of the plague, Aschenbach’s new dwelling allows for
no “human” to approach. “A photographic apparatus, apparently abandoned,
stood on its tripod on the edge of the ocean, and a black cloth, spread
over it, flapped and clapped in the colder wind” (Visconti 58). The camera
applauds what it has blinded and distanced itself to: a world free of masters
and men (herrenlos) at the edge or on the verge of something it is not
prepared to take in. The abandoned camera or surveillance device expresses,
as it were, the exasperation of the panoptic gaze, the futility of any narra-
tive posture absorbing what is just about to unfold but never quite does,
or rather, what will not have not happened.
If we take seriously the role of free indirect discourse, that part of
speech intended to signal the subject (Aschenbach’s) participation in an
amorphous community of speakers with a shared language, then the film
marks Aschenbach’s retreat from such a community of speakers with what
Gilles DeLeuze would call “free indirect images.” Without a master narra-
tive to dictate proceedings, images and voices and sound can circulate and
form connections that defy the panoptic order. “Cinema releases us from
connecting images to form a shared external world, rather we see imag-
ing itself, freed from a fixed point of view” (Deleuze 19). But do they?
Perhaps. To be sure, another camera stands behind or over and above the
dysfunctional one on the beach. But in that interstitial space something
remarkable happens. As the panoptic moves outward or distances itself from
the subject, things get fuzzy and out of focus. Tadzio’s initial appearance
on the edge of the sea—after surviving a playful but sadistic tussle with a
companion—is dappled. While the music finds a second breath and moves
toward a crescendo, the image of Tadzio appears about to dissolve in the
mist of the sea. For at least that moment the mechanisms of surveillance
cannot find purchase or focus. When Aschenbach attempts to lift him-
self from his chair and grasp with what energies remain him the fleeting
figure of the beloved, this momentary freedom from life and death, from
xx Introduction

narrative commentary, from condemnation or just observation, leads him

to an “immensity of richest expectation” (Mann 75). What can await him,
whose boundless love for a forbidden beauty left him no means to express
that poetry or passion save to summon and succumb to the very vapors
which now come to shield and enshrine the beloved?
As we know, it takes little time for the narrator to reestablish a
perch above or apart from the deceased and allow respectable society to
pay its muted tributes before closing the book on this sordid tale. It is the
purpose of this book to reopen and explore the possibilities foreclosed by
the reestablishment of panoptic surveillance before such immensities could
even be articulated. What I am proposing is to view the last scene as an
assemblage or mosaic of immensities that threatens to exceed the limits of
the panopticon and does so, paradoxically, only when the narrator severs all
ties. In other words, Aschenbach can take the final leap into the abyss and
escape whatever controls narration might impose, when even the seeing eye
of the respectable world must avert its glance from the disgraceful acts of
its subject. “And, as so often before, he [Aschenbach] rose to follow” (Mann
75). This time, however, is different, and so it is my aim to explore those
differences with an eye turned toward what might have been or could still
be. For reasons to be explained below, my focus will be on mostly German
texts written around 1800 and their interlocutors, often belated as in the case
of Roland Barthes’s reading of Johnann Goethe. Mann’s “Death in Venice”
is offered as a trenchant example for opening up such a discussion if for
no other reason than that the trajectory of love moves in a direction quite
distinct from current gay politics and its agenda of marriage equality, a goal
achieved, of course, as we proved ourselves to be good liberal consumers
keenly committed to preserving family values. But in what other directions
might queer love lead? Precisely, what historical possibilities foreclosed for
queer love in the past two centuries might be remobilized according to the
indices established by “Death in Venice”?
I have chosen to postpone providing a summary of the chapters to
provide first an overview of much of contemporary queer theory. By pre-
senting the theory before the literature, the former articulates possibilities
for the messianic that are left to the literary texts to actualize, which, as we
will see, means to echo. The theoretical, however, not only defers represen-
tation of the messianic to the literary but also precludes the actualization
with which it charges literature. In response—and the general summary of
the chapters provided at the end of this introduction will speak more to
this—the literary produces something unforeseen but underwritten by the
 Introduction xxi

theoretical. That is, the theory both fosters and disables articulation of the
messianic, offering only echoes instead. Just as important, proceeding in this
fashion underscores how the messianic possibilities of the literary still echo
today and offer indices for a politics removed from the nationalisms and
hierarchies of gay politics. The extended discussion of contemporary queer
theory that follows thus brings together work from various disciplines to
offer a map of where we stand today. It also presents a different narrative
that seizes upon the messianic character of these thinkers as a direct challenge
to the current state of affairs. Indices and literary articulations are all that
the messianic can present of itself; in each instance it refuses conceptualiza-
tion. Before concluding with a map of the argument, I review some of the
more recent attempts to normalize same-sex desire to underscore why the
movements that got us to the SCOTUS decision are neither tenable nor
desirable and thus necessitate a look backward to restore a lost dimension
to the theoretical work discussed in the earlier parts of the introduction.
The November 2016 election of Donald Trump as president of the United
States and the immediate rollback of newly won protections for LGBTQ
people signals the failure of our current politics to prevent a recrudescent
homophobia from obtaining. The early targets of the new administration are
many—immigrants, refugees, women, people of color, Muslims. Whatever
successes the last decades have brought, they also have made it politically
incorrectly correct to see all forms of difference as suspect and threatening.

Queer Temporalities: The End of Empty, Progressive Time

“We are always already dead,” so Judith Halberstam quipped in a published

symposium devoted to queer temporalities (Dinshaw 194). Of course, she
is referring to Lee Edelman’s insistence upon no future; that is, resisting the
refuge of the good, linked among other things to procreation and future
generations. Carla Freccero puts it this way, “I often work on the dead, and
as time goes by I have begun to think of myself as a future dead person
writing myself out of my time while time is running out” (Dinshaw 183).
The dense remark, and we will have occasion to explore what kind of love
future dead people might still have time to discover, prompts the rather
bold question by Christopher Nealon:

In writing about “time” and “history, we definitely [. . .] are writ-

ing about the possible forms and destinies of queer community
xxii Introduction

[communities?]. . . . How are our theorizations of alternate

temporalities legible not only as attempts to think through the
possibilities of movement and community but also as attempts
to think through or around or against the dominant form of
the social organization of the time, that is, the time of the com-
modity. (Dinshaw 186)

To live as one already dead, or rather, to love as one already dead or always
about to die is the central conceit of this project. Before investigating the
theoretical possibilities of inhabiting, in the language of Giorgio Agamben,
the time that remains, or rather, the time that will have remained, let me
position the project in terms of current theoretical debates, after which I will
return to discuss what kind of temporalities might be foreclosed and opened
by readings of texts from around 1800, texts that prepared the ground for
the predicament and pathologies that continue to challenge queer thinking
What necessitates such a project, I believe, is the emergence in con-
temporary Western societies of homonormativity. As one-time sexual outlaws
whose threats to the bourgeois, nuclear family might well have mobilized
different relations of power and knowledge, the contemporary, and par-
ticularly American, gay subject has achieved “equal” status by committing
to late capitalism’s agenda of consumerism (i.e., “the time of the commod-
ity”) in service of the middle-class family of four. The precise concern of
this project is to identify textual moments in selected texts that speak of
a potentiality, not something that is on the threshold to actualization but
rather something that could be or might never be. These moments of radical
meaninglessness or textual stuttering speak to a different kind of gay politics
free of the nationalisms and hierarchies of contemporary heteronormativity.
Stated otherwise, what might (or might not) be realized in those regions
(where the plague originated?) becomes a lost horizon of gay politics that
I am trying to recover or reinvigorate.
My use of potentiality draws upon Agamben’s philological recuperation
of an obscured but decisive aspect of the term.3 Precisely, potentiality is an
entity in itself freed from the binary logic that prescribes an entelechy for
potentiality. That is to say, potentiality is itself queer, insofar as the entity
resists all attempts at conceptualization and defies traditional markers of
being; it both is and is not. Not surprisingly, the apparent opposition of
its defining characteristics, the not-yet-real and the never-to-be real, offers
a productive grid upon which to map or read the current debates sur-
rounding queer theory in the American academy. The refusal of any think-
 Introduction xxiii

ing that accommodates a future or possible actualization of potentiality is

most forcefully proposed by Lee Edelman. In the appropriately entitled, No
Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman baldly avers that the
future is “kid stuff” (Edelman, No Future 4). As an emblem of the nuclear
family’s hope for a future in which the divisions constitutive of the subject
are overcome, the child and the promise of its future reduplicates the social
order and its hierarchies in service of a future forever deferred but preserved
through the child as a carrier of meaning and hope. The charge is for a
nonrelational thinking/being in which the queer subject, traditionally linked
to Freud’s death drive, threatens the social order as a stubborn marker of
the non-sublatable difference and disorder announced by death or a present
with no future. At the other end of the spectrum are those who imagine
queerness as something yet to be realized; a true future, unhinged from the
social structures of the present, is for these scholars, truly queer. Among
these utopian thinkers is the late José Esteban Muñoz who seeks to redeem
futurity, if for no other reason than that current conditions, particularly for
queers of color, are intolerable. Recent attention paid to police violence in
particular underscores the need to recognize the added dimension of misery
that people of color face. As President Obama made clear in his visit to the
El Reno Federal Corrections Institution, poorer people of color end up in
an endless cycle of incarceration for doing pretty much the same “stupid
things” all teenagers do.4 That is to say, queer people of color are already
living a life with no future.
Drawing on the utopian impulse that underwrites the thought of
Ernst Bloch, Muñoz in Crusing Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futu-
rity argues that queerness has not yet been truly imagined. A queer future
brings to consciousness those missed or repressed possibilities of the past
in such radically reimagined or unimagined ways that new possibilities,
particularly queer ones emerge. The past recaptured has never truly been a
lived or actualized past, but remains just out of reach on what I suggested
above is a permanent state of being on the threshold. Muñoz, in fact, pushes
Agamben’s understanding of potentiality to resurrect from the fragments of
the past an actualization of a queer future as the dual deixis of the subject
of the subtitle indicates. In other words, restoring a utopian dimension to
queer hermeneutics transforms or actualizes what has not yet been imagined
so that an authentic queerness can appear. But does potentiality, in the
process, lose once again its character as a distinct entity?
No future/A utopian future. However absolute the difference between
these two propositions may be, queer theory, I argue, is obligated to think
xxiv Introduction

of these two positions together, if not simultaneously. “It is not simply that
queer has yet to solidify and take on a more consistent profile, but rather
that its definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent
characteristics” (Jagose 1). The origin of the word “queer,” derived from the
Low German “terk,” mandates a project that serves as a torque or pivot to
think and preserve this difference, a potentiality that I mark with my use
of the word messianic. Without rehearsing Jacques Derrida’s distinction
between messianism and the messianic, Jagose’s further (in)determination
of the term “queer” might suffice for now: “I use queer to designate a zone
of possibilities always inflected by a sense of potentiality that cannot yet
quite be articulated” . . . and never will be, I would like to add (Jagosse
12).5 The difference lies as much in the impossibility of fulfillment signaled
by the messianic as it does in the posture toward being necessitated by
such an impossibility. Stated otherwise, what does it mean to listen to or
exist in a past whose only evidence of being is that it will have been? Of
course, the same has been said and will have been said of homosexuals: not
self-declared (until recently) until the lack of progeny says all that need be
said but dare not be said about them. The most felicitous formulation of
the messianic potential or its impossible possibility comes in the last two
chapters of this book: I will not have not loved, or in language reminiscent
of Munoz: I will not have not been queer. This is not intended as a word
game. It seeks to elide the trap and trappings of the future perfect that has
always predicted the fate of the homosexual. At the same time, the phrase
articulates a kind of love that escapes the controls, for one, of logocentric
discourse and preserves the elasticity of the queer project. Like the dappled
image of Tadzio as he prepares to signal Aschenbach that it is time, the image
flickers in and out of focus. Meaning appears to adhere to the phrase, yet it
really only approaches it. The double negative does not cancel out to yield
a positive phrase that leads us back to a simple, future perfect. But rather,
as an echo it decidedly precedes the possibility of the love that it seeks to
recapture. Even the double negative offers an unreadable echo of itself. The
“not” resounds before anything has been actualized. Romance languages, as we
know, can only say “no” twice; that is, the use of the double negative is
standard practice. If in English saying “no” twice becomes too often “yes,”
obscuring the indeterminate space occupied by the double negative, my use
is intended to hold all possible meaning in play—and none of them. What
I am seeking to preserve is thus an absolutely queer space that suspends all
and any structures of power and meaning, that leaves the meaning of the
phrase, “I will not have not loved,” unsettled and unsettling.
 Introduction xxv

The messiah, of course, can never make good on her promise, lest
it cease to be a promise. Fulfilled, it would then become something other
than a promise since a promise, by definition, must retain the possibility
of being broken, its terms never being upheld or actualized. Important is
not that the messiah will always be delayed, held back and paradoxically
announced by the catastrophes of history, but that she might still come.
As long as time has not yet ended, who can say?6 A promise, after all, is a
promise. In other words, she might not have not arrived. Yes, she will never
arrive, but she could. And given the outside chance that she will—which
of course she won’t—one must be ready. How pathetic, it seems, for the
messiah to arrive—and not be prepared! As Hamlet reminds us, “The readi-
ness is all.” (Act V.2, 237) That is the impossible proposition that grounds
my response to the theoretical poles of queer thinking represented by Edel-
man and Munoz. Central here is less the semantics of the impossible, but
rather the kind of queer being in the world summoned by such readiness,
which, to cite Agamben again, is living in the time that remains. As Ger-
shom Scholem says of the messianic idea in Judaism, one is compelled to
live a life of deferment in which nothing can be irrevocably accomplished
(Scholem, Messianic 35).
It cannot be stressed enough that the focus of queerness in this project
is less about sex or sexuality and more about a subjunctive masculinity that
has not actualized and certainly would not be structured along the same lines
of a binary distinction that censors, ignores, or erases the female body and
her sexuality. In this regard, the argument seeks to open up new possibilities
for exploring the female (same-sex) desire and its obscured history. While I
do not take this up directly here, there have already been some very inter-
esting readings in this regard, such as the remarkable work of Katrin Pahl.7
Moreover, all the readings here are reparative rather than strictly interpre-
tive. In other words, they seek to provide what Eve Sedgwick-Kosofsky has
called a reparative rather than a paranoid reading. While the latter focuses
on exposing hegemonic or dominant relations of power, reparative reading
seeks its pleasures in assembling fragments from the past and discovering
or uncovering dormant potentialities that could have unfolded or unfolded
differently: “Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be
different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such pro-
foundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that
the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually
did” (Sedgwick-Kosofsky, Paranoid 146). What I described as strictly inter-
pretive are those readings that offer maps and guides to the past but fail to
xxvi Introduction

reconfigure its pieces of knowledge or interpretive bounty in any ways that

challenge the past and seek to alter queer histories going forward.
Secularization in the West prompted a dismissal of the restorative
aspects of the messianic idea in favor of Enlightenment ideals. These ideals
were linked to a progressive notion of history with the aim of humanity
perfecting itself (Scholem 37). The recasting of “Death in Venice” as per-
haps the first modern gay-plague novella emphasizes the restorative rather
than purely utopian impulse of my understanding of the messianic. In
the examples to follow, as well as in the Mann novella, the eruption of
the messianic can occur at any moment, suddenly and unexpectedly and,
especially, when hope has been abandoned. Scholem’s understanding of the
messianic is also instructive here: “Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by
its nature—this cannot sufficiently be emphasized—a theory of catastrophe”
(Scholem 7). It is “transcendence breaking in on history, struck by a beam
of light shining onto it by an outside light?” (Scholem 11). On the one
hand, the messianic is always looming off-scene (after the camera has been
discarded) as something obscene, while the narrator avoids it like the plague
because it is the plague. On the other, it is the dazzling mix of sun and sea
that captures, transforms, and enshrines Tadzio’s last gesture, all the more
irresistible for its flickering and fleeting instantiation of classical perfection.
In this regard, we might recall the words of a rabbi cited in the Talmud:
“May [the Messiah] come, but I do not want to see him” (Scholem 13).
Such words could easily have been uttered by Aschenbach’s narrator or the
upstanding folk appalled by the obscene. But not by us. Given the intense
backlash over the SCOTUS decision legalizing gay marriage and the registra-
tion of that backlash in the 2016 presidential election, we need to be ready.

Soteriologies of Disease

One of the more instructive and lurid possibilities prepared by this confluence
of the messianic with the plague is presented by Leo Bersani in Intimacies,
as it explores the soteriological potentiality of Paul Morris’s video Plantin’
Seed (48). The video shows bottom’s receiving fluids from those penetrating
him. That community is enlarged by the number whose fluids are mixed
into a Tupperware container and then funneled into the bottom’s rectum.
More than demonstrate the kinds of queer communities that can emerge in
the space of potentiatlity signaled by Tadzio, they also highlight the nervous
tension between literature and life, the complex but necessary boundary
 Introduction xxvii

that delimits literary exploration or narrative from actual life. The uneasy
space that separates literature from life, the impossibility of bridging the
two as in this example, may also reserve a space for something fully other
to emerge, a fully other kind of community.
Barebacking practices exemplify the complex political significations of
a love that transgresses the bio-political regimes and its obsessions with bare
life or the homo sacer. “What is at stake isn’t the survival of the individual
but the survival of the practices and patterns, which are the discoveries and
properties of the sub-culture.” (Bersani, Intimacies 46) What Paul Morris
intends with sounding the summons to barebacking in dangerous times is,
as Leo Bersani notes, a literalization of the death drive. “It is as if bare-
backers were experientially confirming a specifically Freudian and Lacanian
notion of sexual desire as indifferent to personal identity, antagonistic to
ego requirements and regulations and, following a famous Freudian dictum,
always engaged in group sex even if the actual participants are limited to
the two partners of the socially approved couple” (Bersani, Intimacies 43).
All of the isms necessary for perpetuation of the future under the watchful
eye of a camera oscura or even the NSA vanish, but so, it seems, would the
practitioners of such unsafe practices. In the lingo of a particularly provoca-
tive group of practitioners, there are the bug chasers and the gift givers;
and HIV, of course, is the gift of choice. Bersani, who admits to wincing
himself at the health implications of such practices, cannot resist reflecting
upon the odd spirituality of the bug chaser as perhaps saintly: “For him,
their identities [“the nameless and faceless crowd”] that have infected him
are nothing more than viral remains; his willingness to allow his body to
be the site of their persistence and reproduction is not entirely unlike the
mystic’s surrender to a divine will without any comfortably recognizable
attributes whatsoever” (Bersani, Intimacies 53). As a lonely carrier of the
“stigmatized remains” of those who preceded him into death, the saintly
bug chaser is absorbed into his beloved until his disease is passed onto
another for consumption.
The introduction of PREP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), whereby sexually
active gay men (not exclusively) take a daily dose of Big Pharma’s Truvada,
changes the dynamics of barebacking, even if bug chasers specifically have no
interest in the potentially life-saving protocol. Most dramatically, it extends
the reaches of the panoptic regime as these potential sexual outlaws, so to
speak, are now bound to a subscribed regimen, monitored and policed
according to sound medical practices. These communities might therefore
(and thankfully) survive, but the dynamics completely change when the fatal
xxviii Introduction

consequences of the behavior have been greatly reduced, if not eliminated,

by the drug, and nothing suggests that bug chasers are not now chasing
drugs rather than disease.8
Reconsidering the NAMES project (AIDS quilt) in this light offers an
opportunity to consider what kind of communities are forged in attendance
to those who died before they were to have died, who died for the most
part as outcasts and lepers as a genteel public did what Aschenbach’s did and
turned away. The quilt panels create communities as diverse as the loved ones
of the many deceased. Each individual panel, stitched to the main canvas,
brings that first community into contact with others, if not all the others,
comprising what has now become—due to its size—a fragment of the entire
quilt, which cannot be held down or displayed in one place. (1,920 panels
were included in the first unraveling in Washington, DC, covering a space
the size of two football fields. Four months later 3,000 panels arrived in the
San Francisco office, indicating both the growing number of mourners and
the work of mourning accomplished by quilting.9 As anyone who witnessed
the quilt being unveiled in those early days of the late 1980s knows, the
unknown and the famous, the glamorous and the plain, the queer and the
straight, the black and the white and the brown and the yellow all share
equal billing. “Each quilt panel has its own tale. They tell of people who
worked and played, who laughed and fought and are finally remembered”
(13). If the initial act of mourning and remembrance was inspired by
a need to at least name those who Reagan and Bush were unwilling to
acknowledge as beings even deserving of bare life, its afterlife hinges on the
new kind of communities that emerge when the already dead, the soon to
be dead, the ones living in dire uncertainty, and those completely queer
to the queer community rediscover each other. “As one man dying of the
disease commented, ‘I decided I had to take the lead in order for them to
get to know me again and to get to know what it’s like for me living this
disease, and what it might be like for them’ ” (Quilt 49). If such a plea
for community and shared love is based upon the semiotics of disease as
a kind of contagion, then its founding members, so to speak, are not just
the disease carriers but those who care for them, commemorate them, and
stitch their memories into a panel where they are joined to a community
of panels whose aesthetics, values, techniques, materials, and messages have
only a shared measure in common. The panels are all uniform in size, 3'
= 6'; Rock Hudson’s is no more easily found than John Trowbridge’s or
James Mooney’s. The book documenting the project carries an introduc-
tion by Elizabeth Taylor, but it is the 25,000 unnamed victims that are
 Introduction xxix

named and remembered here, not so much because the epigraph preceding
Taylor’s instructs us to un-forget them (they were never even counted but
rounded up or down.), but rather in the very kind of coming together and
cancellation of selfhood that Bersani highlights among the gift-giving crowd
and their chasers. The borders of the self extend beyond the measure of
the panel for no other reason than that the self represented by the quilt is
already dead. The dead one inspires the sewer, whose stitching reminds us
of how make-shift and “unnatural” or inorganic this community is, that
such a coming together is only held together by a promise of certain death
and dissolution. All notions that the joining together of so many different
kinds of people might leave only a name as a mark of difference is easily
dismissed. The rest of a snickering “US” may have defined us wholesale as
a group of diseased faggots whose bad end confirmed just how disposable
and indistinguishable from one another we were, but as the quilt unfolds,
such monolithic assertions dissolve; the vast variety of elements compris-
ing the panel and its sheer scope defy a comprehensive or panoptic gaze.
One panel may collect several objects or references to objects dear to the
deceased; others may offer a message from a mourner; another might offer
a playful collage of sex paraphernalia; or some, a nicely stenciled epitaph
with name and dates of the deceased.
The style and material of one panel thus establishes all sorts of random
connections with those of another. Consider the following note accompanying
a panel addressed to the lover of the deceased: “Please know my intent, when
making this panel, was not to invade your memories or life with David. I
have no memories to share of him but I do share one thing with you. On
October 23, 1986, a pain went through my heart that was unbearable. A
loneliness for the loss of a complete stranger—a potential friend. To this
day I cry when I think of how you must miss each other.” (Quilt 63; ital.
added). The signature block of the panel prepared by Cindy reads, “For
your lover, from Cindy, he loves you very much.” Who is Cindy in this
affair? How does she come to be a part of this community? What potential
for friendship might such a threesome have offered?
Adjusting a reading of the quilt to accommodate Bersani’s understanding
of the gift-giving crowd and their beneficiaries cannot help but fail at the
crucial moment. The mourners wandering the periphery of the quilt hardly
harbor hope of finding someone to funnel the collected semen of a group
of anonymous donors into their anus. Most are still terrified of the disease,
many already have it and know it, others have it and don’t know it, and
still others just know someone who does. Simply stated, those connected
xxx Introduction

via the quilt are unlikely to have been chasing the bug and would eagerly
debug themselves as quickly as possible. Still, as Cindy suggests above, a
different kind of coming together, which will never obtain save as a poten-
tiality informing and structuring that union, seems ready to present. Two
other examples from the quilt point as well to modes of relating that help
to understand the sorts of queer love that might have emerged around 1800
and can serve as indices to direct inquiry into that earlier period.
Wayne Hadley learned from his landlord that a man dying of AIDS
was moving in next door. He would sit “on the couch and gaze out my bay
window and wonder what he was doing [. . .]. And then I’d get frightened
and angry and then just wait—and I knew he was doing the same” (Quilt
64). Waiting for a cure that will not come and, depending upon whether
it is pre- or post-1994, will not have not come, such is the mode of readi-
ness that brings these two together. Hadley never met his neighbor and
doesn’t even know if he ever saw him. His panel features a silhouette of a
single figure whose shadow extends across the yellow background. Above the
shadow’s end, written in purple, are the words, “Our brother next door.”
Their friendship, never actualized and existing only in waiting, extends beyond
the death of the one to forge a brotherhood of or in shadows.
The story behind the panel for Clarence Robinson, Jr., (Quilt 23) also
lends energies to different and unlikely forms of advocacy and friendship.
Clarence was placed in an open hallway, avoided by all except for one nurse.
His panel features a McDonald’s hamburger and a milkshake. Afraid of his
fate and of dying alone, Clarence would extend the stay of his visitors by
requesting the above junk food. The oddness of breaking bread under these
conditions with the least auratic of foods is nonetheless occasion to celebrate
or acknowledge a different coming together. Clarence’s sole advocate was his
divorced father, a burly phosphate miner who often broke into tears while
pleading for proper treatment for his son. The person who sewed the panel
never met Clarence. Of course, no one should allow the pathos underwriting
these unlikely relationships diminish the massive grief that occasioned such
coming together. Regardless, the quilt offers a different kind of temporality,
interrupted, disjunctive, restorative, and always just outside consciousness
or on the other side of it.
A most trenchant analyses of a being unto death before one’s time—and
thus also a reflection on Heidegger—is offered by Alexander García Dütt-
mann in At Odds with Aids (Uneins mit AIDS; 1992). García Düttmann
considers what the plague means in terms of embracing one’s finitude and
more specifically, in terms of how it forces us to re-think being unto death
 Introduction xxxi

and the horizon of subjective unity that underwrites Dasein. As we will see,
the interrupted life, the life that mourns its loss before it has been lived,
allows García Düttmann to re-read or adjust a Heideggerian understanding
of Dasein in concert with Jacques Derrida’s assertion that AIDS is an event,
“an Ereignis, [that] one could call historical in the epoch of subjectivity, if
we still give credence to historical, to epochality, and to subjectivity” (García
Düttmann 90). Here then is the rub and the reason for the title. The sub-
ject, to be brief, has always already died. The three highlighted terms have
long been discredited, and yet their half-life extends as means to measure
to what extent AIDS is an event by not being an event, or a pure event, as
García Düttmann emphasized. “At its core, anxiety about AIDS consists of
nothing but anxiety about dying before one’s time” (García Düttmann 2).
Baldly stated, one has been pronounced dead before one has constructed
any serviceable horizon for Dasein, (with respect to the three terms Derrida
invokes above). The AIDS patient is at odds with a subject that has never
been there, only mourned.10
If the death of the subject is the event that marks the death of a subject
whose only evidence of being is having been or having always already been,
then the deployment of AIDS’s destructive forces is a compelling paradigm.
By definition, AIDS pits one at odds against oneself. The virus engineers
control of the immune system to leave the host defenseless. Opportunistic
infections, diseases against which a host capable of defending itself would
easily defeat, prosper. The self is turned against itself. The body is refused
the right to be for itself. Lurking in the deepest recesses of the body, a latent
virus can be reawakened, eager to prey upon the unsuspecting. As such,
the AIDS virus bears a striking similarity to the one conjured by the travel
agent and fed to Aschenbach. One is born and always potentially activated
in the forbidden and murky reaches of “the Ganges,” where paradoxically
no humans dare tread.11
To be at one with AIDS, to accommodate, accept, and resign oneself
to a linear and highly accelerated narrative of death by disease is then to
seek to suture the rupture, which by definition the disease introduces. In
other words, being at odds with oneself and the disease, as shown above, is
inseparable from the Event that ushers in the death of the subject, to the
extent that “ushering in” as understood in this instance disavows any claims
to epochality. Aligning one’s identity with the disease is foreclosed by the
fact that the disease preempts any attempt to construct a unified subject.
Succumbing to the disease now means that the never-to-be subject seeks what
is unrecoverable, if for no other reason than it was always already mourned.
xxxii Introduction

Fighting the disease, for García Düttmann, never consists in confessions of

guilt since confessions presume a subject to issue such self-recriminations.
Aschenbach calls forth the disease and seeks to obliterate his subjectivity as
an expression of unqualified love for one too perfect to be defiled by a fallen
artist. This makes for an uneasy dialogue with García Düttmann, as if the
charge were for gay men to become bug chasers. On the one hand, such
incompatibility may well result from the incompatibility of literature with
life. At the very least, it calls for new forms of cultural production such as
the NAMES project. On the other hand, all share a call to imagine new
ways for the subject-less to relate. In this instance, the love that dare not
speak its name does not because of any taboo (although ones certainly still
exist), but rather because such love is speaker-less. Naming our love, if we
dare to demonstrate our lack, produces a plenitude of names, a promiscuous
mixing of potential partners.
Stated otherwise, to be at odds or not one with AIDS (uneins mit . . .)
one has no time to live life following an avenue that eventually leads to
death. For Heidegger the horizon of Dasein depends upon the indefinite
definiteness of death. It will happen, but its certainty is pushed out into a
future that allows for a construction of something like an autobiographical
subject. A timeline of one’s life can be imagined and constructed. For sure,
Dasein is constantly threatened by the definite indefiniteness of death. In
such manner Dasein anticipates or projects a horizon under the sign of
death to disclose a temporality arising from the future of this possibility.
Such would be, in Heideggerian speak, authentic. “One is not one with
AIDS to the degree that one is not one with time, to the degree that one
exists in the Being-not-one of time and that one is incapable of determin-
ing a measure of time that still permits the construction of a lifetime” (2).
That is to say, the destructive character of AIDS has the potential to
effect a radical political upheaval. Rather than being the “mummy of 1968”
as the French linguist Jean Claude Milner claimed, the illness does not signal
merely the dead body politic of the promises of the student revolts, but
rather it marks the total dissolution of the panoptic systems that require a
subject to trail. García Düttmann can thus proclaim that AIDS is not the
mummified body of the failed cultural politics of ’68, but rather the event
that marks the destruction of character in politics. Exploring just what a
politics without character means is certainly one of the tasks of this book.
How does the pre-pathologized subject of around 1800 present possibilities
for coming together before sexual character determined the character of the
individual or his/her fitness for politics? To recall Aschenbach’s remarks,
 Introduction xxxiii

“And from this [a lack of character] you can perceive that we poets can be
neither wise nor worthy citizens” (Mann 72).
An alternative articulation might read something like this: what kind
of politics could a subject who is always already dead announce or initiate?
For García Düttmann, it clearly begins with a marrying of homosexuality
with the Cartesian cogito: “I am out . . . therefore I am” (García Dütt-
mann 42). This is a particularly complex assertion. How does one who is
always already dead come out? How do the pre-pathologized subjects of
circa 1800 return? We must also keep in mind that the identifications that
permit declaring oneself queer are really what is being mourned at the time
of García Düttmann’s writing. As Douglas Crimp writes, what has been
lost and is mourned is an “ideal,” an ideal of a sexuality whose perverse
pleasures granted homosexuals an identity” (Crimp 11). Any recognition of
identity, the “massive legibility” allegedly produced by the eruption of the
disease (the disease now confirms what we thought you always were), can
thus only be tied to a sign or emblem that stands in for the “recognition
of destruction.” So when García Düttmannn argues for a politics of outing,
it is not one that has a subject coming to his authentic self by proclaim-
ing his sexuality publicly. “When fighting the politics of the state, when
attacking the indifference with which the suffering and dying of the ill is
met . . . the activist cannot avoid the dangers of an equation of AIDS and
homosexuality that creates identity, by having recourse to a sexual ideal
that has already been mourned.” (García Düttmann 54). There is no self
to come out and be what he/she truly is. To come out is to come out as
not being there, as being already dead. That is to say, I am out: Therefore
I will not have not been.12
“Sickness is instructive. We have no doubt about that, even more
instructive [than health]. Those who make sick (Krankmacher) seem ever
more necessary to us today than any medicine men or “savoir” (Nietzsche,
Genealogy 2). Nietzsche’s “Krankmacher,” the one who makes sick, seems
absurd to summon in the time of AIDS. Sickness is not pure negativity,
to recast’s Schelling’s remarks about evil.13 For both Nietzsche and García
Düttmann disease is like the eschaton that inhabits every moment and
threatens to disrupt all forms of succession, leading instead to an upheaval
of all social structures, or, in the language of Nietzsche, a trans-valuation
of all values. “The virus (which belongs neither to life nor to death) may
always already have affected and broken into any inter-subjective trajectory.”
(García Düttmann 90). That is to say, we are always already dis-eased or,
at least, our relations with others are.
xxxiv Introduction

We have seen in three instances how such a rupture opens up to an

unexplored space that resists conceptualization, instantiation, and realization.
To understand that aporia, if I may call it that, consider, as García Düttmann
does, Heidegger’s essay, “The Word Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’ ” (Heidegger
1943). The relationship of uttering the truth of metaphysics (God is dead)
and the impossibility of relying on a metaphysical structure to grant that
statement veracity nicely reflects the impossible possibility of dying before
one’s time. It has already happened but it “exceeds discursive justification”
(García Düttmann 87). Like the already dead AIDS patient, the “epoch”
after the truth of metaphysics leaves its mark by erasing that mark. What
remains are traces that, as Derrida remarked, infiltrate all social bonds “as a
de-structuring structuration.” (García Düttmann 91). What happens then?
What kind of future is one talking about when such futurity has already
been disavowed?
Stated otherwise, linking all three discourses above is an attempt to
read disease by attending to traces that lead back to no real origin and offer
no real history. Still, my work is clearly restorative, promiscuously assembling
traces to recapture a past that might have been but never was and beckons
with its marks of self-erasure. The disease of modernity, one with no access
to an outside or god, is, to speak with Jean-Luc Nancy, “freedom turned
against itself,” at odds with itself (Nancy 20). As it has already structured or
destructured all relations, disease then becomes the terror from within that
ruptures immanence by turning the self against itself.14 It thereby disables
constructions of the homosexual but also opens onto a horizon like that
delimited by Tadzio.

Gay before Being a Subject

A recent recuperative approach by David Halperin in How to Be Gay

attempts to disentangle identity from subjectivity. By revisiting the “secret”
signs of a gay sensibility that provided outlets for queer sentiments without
ever explicitly showing them, he seeks to recover a gay subjectivity that has
been lost due to the ravages of AIDS and the emergence of homonorma-
tive regimes. In light of the above, one would have to view such efforts of
restoration of the gay subject with suspicion. Under what terms can one
re-invent the subject mourned during the time of plague? Halperin refuses
to focus on individual subjects but rather mass culture as a “point of entry
 Introduction xxxv

into non-individualizing, non-personalized, and non-normalizing analysis of

gay male subjectivity” (Halperin, How to be Gay 103). The other part of
the answer is quite straightforward: The gay experience begins before sex.
Since “gay experience” includes many dimensions of subject life beyond
same-sex eroticism, it is possible to attribute a specific gay experience to
a child who has yet to form any clear idea of his eventual orientation or
sexual desire (Halperin, How to Be Gay 93). The statement, made in refer-
ence to D. A. Miller and his crafting of such experience in A Place for Us,
would seem to devalue the very trait that defines us. Can you still be gay
if you don’t lie with another man as you would a woman? Or if you have
yet to lie with anyone? Yes, so long as one understands that the subject is
now not a personalized one, but a milieu, a sensibility whereby the self sees
itself reflected in something different from itself. The Broadway musical is
for Halperin and Miller quite instructive in this regard. What makes the
musical so gay was not that it portrayed gay desire, but rather realized it.
Singing at inappropriate times, channeling desire across all sorts of surrogate
routes, the musical did not offer queer characters, but it did offer a queer
reality. “It denied their identity, but it offered them a world” (Halperin 121).
Hard to overlook is the temporal upheaval inaugurated by the claim
that gay subjectivity has always already arrived. Before there was sex, there
was gayness. On Broadway the young attendee, not yet awakened to same-sex
eroticism, witnesses desire moving in a number of directions that “can be
read simultaneously in seemingly opposite ways”(Halperin, How to Be Gay
107). The Broadway musical is thus gayer than any one of us could ever
be. The homosexual subject, not yet born or awakened, does not mourn
a loss of personal subjectivity (as with AIDS) but celebrates possibilities
that will come to be mourned once subjecthood is claimed. That is to
say, there is a rather queer echo to hear here: an “after” before the “before
“or a “before” after the “after”; gay before being a subject (Halperin) and
dead after having never been a subject (García Düttmann). Simply put, for
queers the times are always out of joint and there is no reason to set them
straight. Rather, the charge is to explore the potentialities sequestered in
that interstitial space of misalignment.
Both Halperin and Miller describe a specifically gay form of interiority
that is the result of oppression but a fount, nonetheless, for gay affect. For
the generation born before Stonewall, Miller identifies three interconnected
aspects of that affect: (1) the solitude, shame, and secretiveness by which
the impossibility of social integration was first internalized, (2) the excessive
xxxvi Introduction

sentimentality that is the necessary condition of sentiments allowed no real

objects, and (3) the intense, senseless joy that, while not identical to these
destitutions, is neither extricable from them (94).
The choice of the Broadway musical as a critical cultural touchstone
could not be more evident. Out there in the dark, the excessively sentimen-
tal but not-yet declared homosexual finds an outlet that deprives him of
personal identifications but offers instead a world in which manufactured
emotion—bursting out in song and dance, for example—substitutes for a
love of one’s own. What Lotte is to Werther, as we will see in chapter 4,
or the fag hag to the fag, the world of the stage is for the pre-Stonewall
generation: a cover but also an outlet to express the kind of love nourished
by its impossibility.
Such potentialities, I suspect, are now foreclosed rather than exhausted.
Social media renders the stuff of interiority as a tweet or Facebook post.
The possibility of an immediate expression or connection short circuits the
delays, detours, and dispersions of the pre-Stonewall subject. Today, the
Broadway musical is unabashedly gay and gay themed. Even if we sing,
dance, and skip, we can be like everyone else. To be sure, here, as in the
other examples, a note of nostalgia is hard to ignore. The devastation wrought
by AIDS, on the one hand, wiped out the community Miller and Halperin
invoke, and, at the same time, the political exigencies of the crisis demanded
a declaration of being out. Recall again García Dütmann’s formulation of
the Cartesian cogito. For those for whom gay history begins with Will and
Grace or Modern Family, personal identifications are encouraged. Come in
out of the dark and we can see, monitor, police and protect you. Such was
the price for organizing politically to combat AIDS. And while no one I
know, at least, longs for the days when the police reacted to hate crimes
against gays with complete indifference (“They’re just fags,” as I was told by
one of Chicago’s best in 1982), the terms of straight society’s endearment
have led to a politics of appeasement and not upheaval or disavowal. How
different our political strategies and agenda would have been, had our best
not died of AIDS!
The attempt to recuperate a radical politics or some form of resistance
to heteronormativity requires for Halperin an acceptance of a permanent
minoritarian position, which does not mean a disavowal of or participation
in popular culture. Mass culture, or rather the reception of it, provides for
a depersonalized interiority that is openly expressed and embraced. Since
gayness can precede sex, this reconfiguration of a closet, if you will, opens
its doors to many not engaged or even considering male-male sex. Sensibil-
 Introduction xxxvii

ity is a more likely a ticket for admission to gayness. Like an allergen, one
becomes sensitized to gayness.
A much more narrowly focused but equally significant understanding
of gay affect underwrites Kevin Ohi’s Henry James and the Queerness of Style.
Mass culture is clearly not the queer matter at hand but rather the late nar-
rative style of Henry James, not for its coding or suggestion of any kind
of male-male eroticism, either in its thematics or its subject matter. Rather,
the late prose works of James acquire a queer character by virtue of their
belatedness, which, as we might recall from the discussion of temporalities
above, serves as a cipher for queer potentiality. For example, early chapters
trace the movement of tropes or syntactic structures as they perform a
deferral of meaning. Zeugma and syllepsis, which expose an unbridgeable
gap in the illogic of the terms joined by a verb or adjective (She broke the
mirror and my heart), disable a straight narrative logic but instead serve as
traces or remnants of an unlived past that points to future configurations
and constellations. The same can be said of James’s “reticence” in narrat-
ing crucial events. Events are reflected upon; nothing is narrated “by the
novel” but rather “in the novel.” Retrospection and/or belatedness serve to
disrupt the causal chains of linear narrative (Ohi, James 7–11).15 These short-
circuitings and misfirings of consciousness as it attempts to come to terms
with what has (for James) always already happened constitute his belatedness
of style. The piecing together of what cannot be put back together (like
the golden bowl of the title with its crack) would seem then to count as
queer. In this respect, queerness as literary style would inhere in all narra-
tive constructions to the extent that no semiotic field is containable, but
for James, of course, it is an (dis)organizing principle. And it is this affect
to which Ohi assigns a queer erotics. “[N]othing might perhaps affect us
as queerer than its disorienting mixing of registers, than its interruptions
of presumed representabilities” (58). Queerest thing of all, perhaps, is that
one always comes out too late in these late James novels, the consequence
of a narrative of retrospection or of style.
Leo Bersani has noted something similar in the polyvalence of the “it”
in James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (Bersani, Intimacies 22−23). In addition
to the “its” with determinable referents and the “it” that refers to a general
state of affairs, there is the “it” that speaks to the unnamable catastrophe
or law that the two main figures grow old together waiting for. Therewith
lies for Bersani the potentiality embedded in James’s style: a tendency to
“extract all events, as well as all perspectives from them, from any speci-
fied time, and to transfer them to a before or an after in which they are
xxxviii Introduction

de-realized in the form of anticipations and retrospections” (23). In other

words, queerness (gayness for Halperin) exceeds the contours of individual
bodies or a personal subjectivity. For Ohi, arriving too late “allows one the
equivocal opportunity to confront the potentiality of identity,” to inhabit
subjects without actually being there (68). Identity’s potentiality is explored
through James’s style, which resists or upends stable systems of meaning. It
is as unstable as the following reworked but by now familiar formulation:
I will not have not come to know. And if one comes out too late (as does
Strether in The Ambassadors) or only comes to know how to be gay rather
late (as Halperin says of himself ), there is always time for next Sunday’s
matinee on 42nd Street, if only Broadway—to recall Sam Delaney’s Times
Square Red, Times Square Blue—were still Broadway.

Sexual Outlaws

While for Halperin and Ohi the body is less in play than sign systems,
Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman have published a dialogue, Sex, or the
Unbearable, which has lots to say about bodies. The latter is linked to the
former, insofar as sex is a burden no one can carry because of the unbearable
challenges to selfhood and future selfhood sex poses. “[W]e both see sex
as a site for experiencing [an] intensified encounter with what disorganizes
accustomed ways of being” (Berlant 11). The Western tradition may decry
sex as dangerous and disruptive, but Berlant and Edelman only wish it had
lived up to its promise. Rather than link sex to hopes of a reconstituted
future through future production of bundles of joy, sex is stripped of such
optimism. “One need not romanticize sex to maintain that it offers, in
its most intensely felt and therefore least routinized forms, something in
excess of pleasure, of happiness or the self-evidence of value” (Berlant 12).
Only by allowing sex to perform the work of negativity can we escape the
“Panoptimism” that rules us.16 Instead of attempting to attach worth to any
sexual encounter, one should be swept away to a point of no return. The
joys of sex have nothing to do with the self-satisfaction tied to an affirma-
tion of one’s sovereignty. Instead, one luxuriates in no-longer being one.
“It breaks us down in multiple, non-identical ways, all of which are in a
complex relation to relation itself “(Berlant 117). Relations are fluid. How
could they not be when multiple selves are put into play with no aim at
sustaining the relationship(s) and thus disabling the possibility of hegemonic
regimes and disciplines? The larger claims, as I just noted, extend to rational-
 Introduction xxxix

ity in general; one can only misrecognize an interlocutor, who like oneself
is permanently under destruction.17 That is to say, sovereignty is always in
question, or rather, disabled. The power of the negative is embraced.
Of interest for this project is how these claims resonate with the pos-
sibilities opened up by disease and the plague as well as the markers of those
possibilities around Germany in 1800, when much of the vocabulary still
in use today in both psychology and psychiatry found purchase. What is
clear from all the scholars presented above is a discontent with the present
queer state of affairs. Marriage, child-rearing, picket fences, PTA meetings,
and renewed marriage vows of until death-do-we-part stand in bald contrast
to the sorts of nonrelationality considered here. Instead of congratulating
ourselves on having a seat at the table, we might opt to vomit. Look at
what’s being served: Babies bred by shopping catalogues for super sperm
donors and saintly surrogates. Or more generally, we are merely helping to
reconstitute the same relations of power we decried. As celebrations greeted
the Supreme Court’s landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage, the
White House let the world know that the LGBTQ community was a wel-
come addition to (inclusion in?) the fabric of American life. So much so that
a projection of the Rainbow flag covered the façade of the White House.
“America likes us. She really likes us.” The irony embedded in that show
of apparent solidarity can hardly be missed. The universal symbol of global
capitalism gladly displays its gay face. Indeed, there are angels in America.18
“God Bless America . . . and nobody else.” But let’s not be fooled by what
lurks behind that display of global pride. Backlash has already been swift;
recent laws in the name of so-called religious freedom should alert us to
just how close we are to losing everything, only one election away in fact.
Hardly irrelevant to this display of America welcoming us into its fold is
lifting the ban that prevented gay men and women from serving openly
in the military. Once we are deemed fit to die for our country and hitch
our dreams to that of the American military, we are fit to be paraded and
celebrated.
Already in Homos Leo Bersani poses the provocative question: can the
homosexual be a citizen? Not surprisingly the title for the entire chapter that
takes up this question is “The Gay Outlaw.” And like Halperin, Bersani is
also intrigued by a homosexuality before sex. Gide, the first outlaw Bersani
considers, or rather Michel from The Immoralist, credits his recovery from
tuberculosis with his interactions with Arab youth. Here, we have what appears
to be the classic pederast, arrested by the life-affirming beauty of the Arab
boys. Except that movement is everywhere. Underneath the layers of colonial
xl Introduction

constructions of selfhood and citizenship. Michel discovers the surface, the

narcissistic expansion of a desiring skin, which is “also the renunciation of
any narcissistic self-containment” (Bersani, Homos 123). Unlike the typical
colonialist traveling in Tunisia who sought to include sexual colonialism as
part of the deal, Michel’s only sexual relationships are strictly heterosexual.
This is a “non-relational” pederasty that desires or wants nothing from an
other to complete the self of the predator. “The Gidean homosexuality of
The Immoralist knows no such demands, and its very emptiness constitutes
a challenge to any sexual ideology or profundity” (Bersani, Homos 123).
Whatever communities can be imagined through the unleashing of
such energies that recognize no other are both one and not one (uneins),
or rather potentially singular and plural. That is to say, by definition they
exceed the boundaries of any nation state’s interest. Instead of an enemy, the
other is merely cruised as an “opportunity, at once insignificant and precious,
for narcissistic pleasures” (Bersani, Homos, 129). Juxtaposing Michel with
Aschenbach is instructive here. While these energies bring Michel back to
life (at the expense of his wife and neat heterosexual coupling), those same
energies invite the plague to pay Aschenbach a visit. What they also share
is the possibility of eliding the controls of the panopticon. “By abandoning
himself to the appearances of sexual colonialism Gide was able to free himself
from the European version of relationships that supported [. . .] colonialism”
and, we might add, its peachy Panoptimism (Bersani, Homos 34). Can we
say something the same of Aschenbach and the Austrian-Hungarian empire?
At the very least, both are outlaws, undone by erotic pleasures that demand
a sacrifice of the desiring subject and disable objectification of the beloved.
Just as Aschenbach cannot lift himself from his chair, there is no possibility
of the two standing straight like subjects towering over their latest erotic
conquest. As political subjects, they don’t meet the minimum requirement
of residency. They are always unterwegs, on the way.
The status of the homosexual as outlaw, unfit for civil society, takes
a particularly intriguing twist with Bersani’s analysis of Proust’s, Sodom and
Gemorrah and its apparent, essentialist understanding of heterosexuality:
inverts are actually females who can only long for other males. And who
but an invert would have sexual relations with an invert? Thus, the invert
can only satisfy his desire by projecting onto the surface of the other, the
male, to fill his inner lack as a female. It doesn’t take long for Bersani to
dissolve the essentialisms that seem to underwrite such a strict understanding
of male/female. The following passage refers to the narrator having spied on
the pickup scene between Charlus and Jupien. At which time he realizes he
 Introduction xli

was right all along about the Baron Charlus, whose outward show of virility
could not completely mask the woman he truly was within.

The very stringency of these sexual categories thus demands an

incessant crossing over from one sex to the other, and it wreaks
havoc with the boundaries that usually keep each category in
place. For in Charlus there may be two quite different women:
the one who has a “manly ideal” and desires the male figure he
is not, and the other who, in responding to an effeminate male
invert like Jupien is revealing the man “she” really is by pursuing
a woman.19 (Bersani, Homos 137)

The madness does not stop there. What about Jupien? Is he tricking himself
into believing the baron is still all male, still all straight? Does he respond
to the body, to the surface, and ignore the woman lurking beneath? The
dizzying possibilities for refiguring inversion in terms of what in the other,
the woman masking herself as a man, finds alluring can never present a
readable map. Any symmetry (a male masked as a woman desiring the
opposite) opens up a world of impossible possibilities; one set of hetero-
sexual attractions is always invaded by an other half, a truer half, if you
will. Introduce jealousy into this already confused equation, (i.e., desire as
lack) and not only does the object of desire undergo incessant shifts, but
desire itself is now also routed through the desire of the other. One desires
the other’s desire.
Without playing through the endless configurations that now emerge
in addition to what was just outlined, two things are clear: The invert
is always already a socialized being in search of him/herself in an other.
“The sexual dramas of A la Recherche du temps perdu metamorphosize a
fundamental relation between the I and the non-I, a relation in which the
subject is condemned to sociality as the precondition of self-identification”
(Bersani, Homos 144). Any narcissistic expansion of the self, which a fun-
damental lack demands, means the self can find itself only by engaging an
other who will always remain “irreducibly” other. The sovereign subject—an
indeed the SCOTUS decision presumes such sovereignty among consenting
adults—is only always dependent on a relation to him-/herself that is never
self-same. Broadway’s anthem of the 1980s to celebrate gay existence (“I
am what I am” from Le Cage aux Folles) would have to be rewritten: I am
what I am not or perhaps, I am not what I am not. In fact, the absurdity
of Le Cage aux Folles—and here we should recall how overtly gay-themed
xlii Introduction

materials mark the end of the pleasures of gay subjectivity—was recalled

by George Hearn.20 One of its show-stopping tunes, “The Best of Times
Is Now,” stood in sharp contrast to times in which many members of the
company and production crew were dying almost daily.
The other affront to the state is not unlike the dappling on which I
commented in “Death in Venice.” “The dizzying intersections of essences
in Proust’s work blur the boundaries that essences are designed to solidify.”
The declaration or positing of male or female essences only serves to blur all
identities and thus disable any “disciplinary judgments.” As such, psychology
is disabled; the law of the father is challenged since fathers and mothers
must also be counted as casualties of such an unreadable interiority. (Bersani,
Homos 145−46). Moreover, self-declarations are always spurious, or at least
affirmative ones. How can the state issue papers to an unintelligible self?
Or, to one who can only declare him/herself by what one is not or lacks?
How does the state track, sanction, and discipline the subject who declares:
I will not have not been me.
Just how awkwardly, at best, the depersonalized self, whose boundar-
ies are nothing other than fluid, exists within the state is baldly apparent
if we consider briefly Carl Schmitt’s well-known definition of the political:
“The specific political distinction to which political action and motive can
be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (Schmitt, Concept 26). In
other words, us against them, the self against the Other.21 One can easily
dismiss the characterization by looking at the source and Schmitt’s disastrous
political affiliations during National Socialism. Nonetheless, it is hard to
deny the cogency of the essay’s most challenging insight: “The concept of
the state presupposes the concept of the political” (Schmitt, Concept 19).
Schmitt’s critique was aimed at the failing liberal state in Germany, citing the
occlusion of the political that had been “negated” by the economic, social,
and cultural spheres. That is, the liberal state had weakened the political
by denying its basis. Since the political is that sphere concerned with the
real possibility of physical killing, it assumes precedence and urgency. In his
affirmation of the political Schmitt attempts to re-secure the basis of the
failing liberal state, but the proper recognition of the political depends upon
recognizing its polemical foundation. Schmitt makes clear that the political,
and thus the state, exists only by virtue of the pre-existence of an enemy
or absolute Other. “One may say: every ‘totality of men” looks around for
friends only—it has friends only—because it already has enemies.”22 Given the
life-or-death stakes that inhere in the political, all political discourse finds its
energies in these struggles: “[A]ll political concepts, ideas, and words [have]
 Introduction xliii

a polemical meaning; they have a concrete opposition in view, they are tied
to a concrete situation” (Schmitt, Concept 83). Schmitt’s observation that
“all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized
theological concepts” underscores the contradiction inherent in the liberal
state that proclaims the sovereignty of the subject (Schmitt, Political Theol-
ogy 52). The basis for such freedom is tethered to the very principles that
secularism disavows. The liberal subject thus comes to be only by embrac-
ing a metaphysical stance to justify the friend/enemy distinction. On the
other hand, consider the diagnosis vis-à-vis Bersani’s or Garcia Düttmann’s
insistence on a self that has always already vacated its position. The strict
boundaries of friend and enemy are meaningless, or we might say, the gay
outlaw knows of no Other. The gay self that erects itself upon the liberal
concepts of the state can only do so since the state, which exists because of
the preexistence of the enemy, is looking for friends. And we are, if nothing
else, such gay company. The irony embedded in the White House’s display
of the rainbow flag merely signaled that we, too, in need of friends as the
deadly shadow of AIDS continued to subside but nevertheless haunt our
own self-understanding, had found a new enemy. As we will see, that new
enemy was the terrorist.

Selling Out

How then did gay politics become so complicit with the aims of the state?
An awkward and purely speculative answer would be “protease inhibitors.”
Ever since the cocktail enabled so many of us to return to our lives of
average mediocrity, being-at-odds with oneself and one’s disease was an
option gladly abandoned. Of my friends still living, we all remember those
awful times as a dark void in which we hobbled along day by day, hop-
ing never to have to face the light and the awful carnage of our friends
cruelly ridiculed and abandoned by the state. To cite Virgil: “How to tell
of carnage beyond telling?” (Virgil 246). For most, the memories have lost
any resolution. Rather than go back, we moved on. The political energies
harnessed to win badly needed funding and legal protections constructed
an in-road to state power that, coupled with the loss of radical leaders, led
to an abandonment of our marginal status in favor of a position inside,
secured from the enemy without. Shall we consider this new state of affairs
one of absolute immanence and AIDS among the enemies kept out? But
without working through the potentialities opened up by the disease, which,
xliv Introduction

it would seem, would amount to a work of mourning, we resigned ourselves

to a politics of appeasement. Two claims are being entertained here: (1)
the good gay citizen now participates in the very structure of the political
that was the source of an anguish that peaked during the AIDS crisis, and
(2) the rupture opened up by the disease also pointed to potentialties of
the past that could be recaptured in service of an outlaw politics. Stated
otherwise, if the panopticon signals that there is no transcendence, or
rather no transcendence of immanence, then disease or sickness turns out
to be a “positive possibility of existence,” a freedom that unleashed “turns
against itself.” The absolute world of the panopticon and its attendant
“panoptimism” are threatened within by disease: “In our eyes, AIDS does
not come from God, but because it cannot yet be cured, it is seen as a sort
of self-destruction of a society at the mercy of its own pure immanence”
(Nancy, Une penseè fine 29). As a potential marker of an internecine battle
of the self against itself, of the body (politic) turned against itself such that
friend/enemy distinctions also dissolve, AIDS registered, at the very least, a
possibility for restoration of a transcendent or messianic horizon that was
quickly foreclosed by the politics of appeasement.
Now that we have won the status of friend, now that much of America
is willing to reject claims that we aim to destroy all that’s great and grand
about the family, now that we, too, can register at Tiffany’s, who is the
new enemy? If my cynicism seems particularly ill-advised, given how hard
we have had to fight to win such basic rights for the homo sacer, consider
how women, immigrants, and African Americans find their rights under
fierce attack. It is as if a game of thimble rigging were being staged, entic-
ing one group to join the party while others feel under renewed and even
more rigorous assault. As the staging of the rigging goes on, the class war
being fought against all of us and designed to align the state fully with the
interests of business gets scant attention. If we are always being distracted,
perhaps distraction, i.e., pulling away, offers an alternative. And where better
to have once found distraction than at Times Square.
Such is one way to read Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times
Square Blue. The interest here, which cannot be divorced from the agenda
realized by the SCOTUS decision, is the destruction brought on by gentri-
fication of an interlocking set of subsystems that brought together people of
wildly diverse backgrounds who for reasons far beyond the obvious availed
themselves of the adult theaters that at one time defined the Square. What
matters for Delaney is how Times Square mobilized a crossing of classes,
races, genders, etc. that Delaney insists are necessary for a democratic society
 Introduction xlv

to function: “The primary thesis underlying my several arguments here is

that, given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most
rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people under-
stand, appreciate, and seek out interclass communication conducted in a
mode of good will” (Delaney 111). It is difficult to avoid the suggestion that
the call is for preserving or reinventing new ways to accommodate oneself
to the mode of capitalism under which we live. Except that it is this very
mode of capitalism and redevelopment that led to the dismantling of the
subsystems intersecting at Times Square. There is a messianic dimension to
the mode of being in this mode of capitalism. This relates not so much to
its restorative aspect—although the reporting of contacts and experiences
in these vanishing subsystems is critical to the project—but as a mode of
readiness or preparedness when, to quote Heinrich Heine, “capitalism is
finally over.” The subsystems are constantly being reconstructed with every
encounter among “male and female, gay and straight, old and young, work-
ing class and middle class, Asian and Hispanic, black and other, rural and
urban, tourist and indigent, transient and permanent, with their bodily,
material, sexual and emotional needs.” (Delaney xx). An altogether new
distribution of power, at times even a suspension of power relations, is
detailed in the stories and anecdotes that comprise Times Square Red. A
politics that eschews the hierarchies of marriage and capitalist production
seems an embedded possibility here, even if Delaney regards peep-show
encounters as strengthening his own relationship. “You learned something
about these people (though not necessarily their name, or where they lived,
or what their job or incomes was); and they learned something about you.
The relationships were not (necessarily) consecutive. They braided. They
interwove. They were simultaneous” (Delaney 57). The final sentences of
the quote certainly reminds one of the kind of relationships inaugurated
by the quilt and its interweaving of panels that brought together so many
from such different places. Both are recalled as well under a sign of mourn-
ing for the kind of relationships or coming together that might have been.
At the same time, the preservation of those discourses suggests a coming
together that might not have not been. Certainly, one can no longer expect
to hear such resonances above the din that regularly begins every weekday
with the broadcast of Good Morning America from high atop the Disney/
ABC Studios in Times Square.
Just how marriage, conceived as it is according to the spoken but
rarely fulfilled vows of heterosexual marriage, is tied to the apparatus of
the state is self-evident. What is not as evident is how other possibilities
xlvi Introduction

for different kinds of marriages or arrangements become suppressed. In The

Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, Michael
Warner argues that the struggle for gay marriage was always a regressive
one, anything but liberating.

It is always tempting to believe that marrying is simply some-

thing that two people do. Marriage, however, is never a private
contract between two persons. It always involves the recognition
of a third party—and not just a voluntary or neutral recognition,
but an enforceable recognition. (Warner, Normal 117)

The privileges reserved for the married have been well documented as the
argument for expanding its definition to include same-sex couples made its
way through the courts. These range from the control and disposition of
community property to next-of-kin privileges during hospital stays. As Warner
notes, none of the privileges reserved for married couples recognized by the
state need to be contingent upon the institution save divorce and its attendant
pleasures. For example, parenting rights among gay people often involve a
third adult, an arrangement not accommodated by the state since parenting
rights require marriage. Equally disturbing are the sorts of hierarchies that
grow up around such institutions. How long before the single gay man in
his thirties will have to fret and bear the shame of becoming an old maid?
Deplorable for Warner and many of us is not just the artificial cleav-
ing of specific rights to marriage and thus the controls of the state but also
the narrative that accompanied the campaign. Particularly comical, were it
not so consequential, was the coming-of-age account offered by Andrew
Sullivan. Just too rich are Sullivan’s reactions to those who considered, like
Delaney, the elimination of the subsystems that promoted casual intimate
contact across classes with nostalgia and regret:

[T]here are plenty of people . . . who prefer to chant mantras

of decades gone by and pretend that somehow this is 1957 and
straight America is initiating a Kulturkampf against sex in parks
and somehow this is the defining issue of our times . . . It is
a victim panic, a terror that with the abatement of AIDS we
might have to face the future and that the future may contain
opportunities that gay men and women have never previously
envisaged, let alone grasped. It is a panic that the easy identity
 Introduction xlvii

of victimhood might be slipping from our grasp that maturity

may be calling us to more difficult terrain. It is not hard to
see what that terrain is. It is marriage (as cited, Warner, 136).

With that Sullivan dismissed any attempt to think through all the
promises of an outlaw politics as discussed above. Instead, we are retarded
survivors of trauma that need to restart our development by clinging to the
ideals of married life. For Sullivan, does that mean he has given up his bare-
backing forays in the night now that marriage offers him all the intimacies
for which previous, “immature” encounters prepared him?23
The other glaring oversight of proposing such puerile paths to nor-
mal is the underlying desire and claim that marriage is a ticket to seamless
assimilation. The straight world was not freaked by our sexual orientation
but rather by our sexual practices. To be sure, acceptance of queers has
shifted dramatically, so long as we are seen as wanting what everybody else
wants. The identification of what was once seen as an invisible threat to
the wholesome life of the nuclear family has its advantages for reactionary
forces in society. Already, the Republican National Committee has thrown
its support behind the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA). This would
allow those opposed to same-sex marriage and homosexuality in particular
to refuse to provide treatment or service to those whose “lifestyle” offends
their religious beliefs. Surely, an IRS official could then refuse to process a
tax return from a same-sex couple, and those seeking shelter or assistance
from federally funded programs would face similar obstacles. Given that
America has always seemed to me a nightmare of Protestant making inso-
far as one’s personal relationship with God takes precedence, there is no
shortage of religious beliefs, cherry picked from various sources that claim
universal validity because God ordained such beliefs in the private sanctuary
of one’s soul. So, pace Sullivan, our claims of coming-of-age to embrace a
real and responsible future and to dare tread the sanctified terrain of mar-
riage are rejected by those who would speak for God through appeal to
what is cloaked in typical Nazi double talk, namely “religious freedom.”
Still, many may lament that such foes are simply on the wrong side of
history, and they, too, will travel down a path of generational maturation,
at which time, I suppose, they will mark the occasion and invite Mr. and
Mr. Sullivan to high tea.
Whatever reassurances such mantras may offer, the grounds upon which
equality is based are, it seems to me, quite shaky. In 1994, long before a
xlviii Introduction

sea change in attitudes swept across the land, legal scholar Janet Halley
outlined the stakes for finding legal justifications to expand the rights of
same-sex couples. While the analysis is both thorough and insightful, the
interest of the article lies in mapping out a position that aligns queer politics
with prevailing legal theory based upon legal precedent. In other words, the
question that drives the argument is: how can we render assurances that
we will be good citizens? That doesn’t overshadow, however, what certainly
seems to be one exceptional insight: that any tenable position on the origins
and causes of homosexuality must conform to historically engrained conceits
of a society that understand heterosexuality as the model of productivity
and normalcy. Her espousal of behavior constructivism, where the object is
given (biology is the cause) but the behavior or the actions inspired by the
biologically determined object are a result of social construction is something
of a compromise position that carefully hedges its bets by anticipating that
a completely constructivist or essentialist position is not legally tenable, and
maybe for good reason (Halley 520−40). The risk of biological determinism
is the same as any theory that claims biology or bloodlines determine social
behavior. Simply bursting out in song to declare we were born that way
doesn’t guarantee that enough additional behaviors will not be attributed
to biology, such as violent or asocial acts, so that the state will feel entitled
to exclude those deemed biologically at odds with its interests.
Constructivist strategies do not promise any additional security. Assem-
blages of power would seem to guarantee that the state and its apparatuses
have always already conditioned its subjects according to the essence of the
political or the friend/enemy distinction. In other words, legal justifications—
other than for behaviors that qualify as promoting an eventual arrival on
the mature terrain of marriage—demand an abandonment of communities
uninterested in sustaining the myth of the sovereign subject. Or, for those
of us whose standing vis-à-vis the laws of civil society are always vexed and
fraught, why would we think that culture is easier to change than biology, an
observation made quite some time ago by Eve Sedgwick Kosofsky (Kosofsky
Epistemology, 43). Moreover, any lens that proposes to distinguish between
the natural and the cultural is itself a production of culture. How could
the natural ever be brought to consciousness of itself without becoming
unnatural? That is not to dismiss the importance of political action and
non-hegemonic coalition building, but as Halley’s analysis shows, a radical
rethinking of our political strategies is required. My intent in (re)introducing
a messianic dimension is to reimagine possibilities for coming together out-
side the interpellations of the state. Even if a certain readiness, as described
 Introduction xlix

above, does not immediately translate into an activist politics, it necessitates

formations of the self that are constantly undone by anticipation of an end
with no future in sight. For now, it seems accommodating any and all and
possible random causes for or sources of desire makes policing us less certain.
Even those who espouse a biological basis for same-sex desire cannot
claim any clear line that links genetics with foreseeable outcomes.24 Amazon
Prime’s highly acclaimed series Transparent offers an insight into just how
complicated and unmappable genetic transmission can become. The lead
character, Mora—previously Mort—becomes a woman late in life.25 Most
of the first two seasons track the exceptional dysfunction of Mora, his ex-
wife, and their three children with pronounced but not necessarily featured
references to their Jewish-German origins. The oldest and youngest, both
daughters with a son sandwiched in between, display a remarkable but
troubled fluidity of sexual preferences. In the last episodes, Mora’s uncle
is seen being arrested and presumably murdered by the Nazis during a
raid of the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute in Berlin. A previous reference to
ecogenetics clarifies the connection.26 The uncle was a transvestite whose
horrific death makes an apparent imprint on the genetic makeup of his
sister who is with her brother at the time of the arrest. We are left with
the impression that Mora’s gender dysmorphia is the traumatic expression
of that mutation, which is then passed on to his children. The transmission
is highlighted by juxtaposing the raid on the institute with the events that
take place at a women’s music festival. At the festival, Mora learns that she
is not considered a woman, because she was not born with a vagina. The
randomness but painful cut that separates Mora from her own sends her
frantically seeking out her daughters as the world spins ominously before
her. Her panic visually and emotionally mimics that of her uncle several
decades before, as do the extreme behaviors of the three children at that
precise moment. The son experiences a complete breakdown, exhibited by
a fierce road rage that leads him to a full breakdown and to consult his
mother’s latest interest, an upstanding member of the Jewish congregation.
Here, he is instructed to mourn for his father, which he does by weeping
in the arms of what is now a surrogate father. However clear the source of
the dysfunction might be, the lines emanating from that primal scene are as
crossed as the lovers in the series. Mora’s uncle might have insisted on her
female name, but unlike her descendant, she had no opportunity to become
or free the women trapped inside her male body. All four of these characters
are doubly traumatized by something carried genetically: (1) the experience
of gender dysmorphia, and (2) the Nazi raid witnessed by Mora’s mother.
l Introduction

If we consider this transmission—indirect insofar as the lost son/daughter

is not the carrier but rather the sister, and direct insofar as Mora’s mother
experienced the Nazi’s destruction firsthand PTSD continues postmortem,
transmitted to and experienced by subsequent generations, even if it its paths
are circuitous and hardly straight. To the extent that the discovery of being
gay has always carried its fair measure of trauma, Transparent forces us to
question what predictive power such biological approaches might ultimately
have. In this instance, an insurmountable obstacle frustrates epi- or ecogenetic
tracking in the figure of the transvestite uncle. However strong the desire
in the 1930s to undergo some sort of procedure to fix things—the uncle
is not a transsexual, even if he insists on having official papers list him as
female. There are no surgical options for him. And a gay person was not
always “gay.” The gene that apparently transmits such knowledge has always
already been permeated by different discourses for naming, identifying, and
dealing with people given to same-sex desire.

Gay Terrorists

The shortcoming of my analysis to this point is its American-centric con-

sideration of political formations. The global map, as we know, offers a far
less halcyon picture of gay life. American exceptionalism is reinforced in
the special way that we have come to rehabilitate queers. America’s way of
life is exceptional because it allows even queers, once they have matured,
to share in its dreams and way of life. Likewise, such exceptionalism relies
on the same matrices of class, gender, sex, and nationality to re-produce a
different kind of queer body in the new and more threatening version of
Orientalized terrorists. The recent attack in a gay nightclub in Orlando that
left 49 patrons dead demonstrates the dialectic here. On the one hand, the
terrorist, a devout Muslim who proclaimed sympathies with ISIS, is seen
as an enemy of all humanity, whose unfitness for Western society is his
hatred of gay people. Conservatives were reluctant to call this a hate crime,
preferring instead to see the murders as an assault on the Western way of
life. They even went so far as to call the gay victims “human beings.” That
rumors circulated that the killer might be gay or at least confused pointed
to the supposed differences in the civilizing effects of the two cultures. In
the West, we become normalized. Islam, on the other hand, brings out the
monster always potentially lurking in the homosexual. In fact, the two are
indistinguishable. Islam produces sexual deviants. Also, two weeks before
 Introduction li

the attacks, the GOP House of Representatives in Florida prayed for God
to smite all gay people. Suddenly, which ideology actually underwrites the
homophobic terrorist is unclear. No matter where he was living or where
he was born, he cannot possibly be really American, lest one weapon in the
ideological battle against terror be useless. The stakes in securing his ties to
ISIS and not allowing for any of his deadly impulses to be connected with
anything American, not even the prayers of his state representatives, indicates
how the homosexual has become instrumentalized for purposes of the state.
Jasbir Puar,27 relying on the work of Rey Chow,28 traces the con-
nectivities of the matrices noted above to reconstitute the friend/enemy
distinction along lines of the properly queer and the improperly queer. Not
only has the readjustment, so to speak, of these matrices been reconstituted
to resecure the privileged space of whiteness, as Chow maps, but the gay
rights movement in America has been critical in rebranding the Oriental as
the queer gone amok as well. “[T]he contemporary U.S. heteronormative
nation actually relies on and benefits from the proliferation of queerness,
especially in regard to the sexually exceptional homonational and its evil
counterpart, the queer terrorist of elsewhere” (xxv). Queer needs to be
understood as incapable of being normalized, which, in turn renders the
queer a wild, unpredictable threat that can only be contained by reinscribing
its eccentric course according to a geopolitical map, reorganized around the
friend/enemy distinction, or as G. W. Bush put it, those who are with us
and those who are against us (xxv). Those against us are terrorists in love
with death, and their queers, like the American queers of old, are embodi-
ments of the death drive. The exceptional nature of America is evinced in
its unique style of tolerance that transforms the queer with no future into
a devoted member of the PTA. And despite the homophobic and racist
tactics of the U.S. military, homonormative subjects benefit from American
exceptionalism whose brand is strengthened by enlisting in its ranks those
formerly thought to be a ticking time bomb inside the American family.
As a result, this shift produces an image of Muslim masculinity as terrorist
and sexually aberrant: “[M]uslim masculinity is simultaneously pathologically
excessive yet repressive, perverse yet homophobic, virile yet emasculated,
monstrous yet flaccid” (xxv). Nothing about this figure makes sense except
to ascribe to his person a new version of queerness with all the markings of
both predatory but also unnaturally feminine and passive traits. He embodies
the terror of what exceeds the limits of normativity.
The newly formed or accepted homonormative family attests to how
far the United States is willing to go to welcome diversity. If we pride our-
lii Introduction

selves as a nation on our ability to rehabilitate even queers, who were not
that long ago bearers of death and disease, our impotence in the face of the
predatory but unnaturally feminine body of the Oriental terrorist, evinces
the gravity of the danger (xxv). In other words, it extends the claims of
American exceptionalism to include now American sexual exceptionalism.
Consider the draconian measures taken against gay men in Uganda. Driving
that agenda was the religious right of America.29 To be sure, many would
like homosex to offer just cause for imprisonment or death, but critical is
how these different pressures coalesce in patterns that exceed the intention
of any one group. In this case, the religious right’s disgust of same-sex sex
finds an outlet in Uganda, which serves to reinforce the image of the Other
as intolerant and brutal and stricken with disease. Meanwhile, our own
prison populations, in which rape is not only not uncommon but is also
used as a threat during police interrogations, exists, as Foucault described
in Discipline and Punishment, to displace the scene of torture; it becomes
as secret as the War on Terror. And that displacement, of course, eases the
displacement of the previous American deviant onto the terrorist.

Map of the Argument

Recently, renewed, vigorous research has appeared reconsidering the early,

pioneering work of German sexologists. Robert Tobin’s excellent volume
Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex looks at a variety of scientific,
literary, and political discourses from 1830 to the early twentieth century to
chart the origins of the emerging languages of sexology and psychoanalysis.
I am seeking to find traces of what was discarded, dismissed, or overlooked
in the period just before 1830.30 Likewise, Robert Beachey’s Gay Berlin:
Birthplace of a Modern Identity makes the bold but convincing argument that
the homosexual liberation movement finds its origins and most progressive
strains in Berlin, even long before the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute arose to
celebrate diverse sexualities. As the editors of the volume, After the History of
Sexuality: German Genealogies with and beyond Foucault, stress, “Rather more
starkly than was the case for sexual science, the emergence of homosexual
self-consciousness and political activism was a largely German-language
affair” (3). Particularly notable, of course, is Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs whose
self-identification as an “uranien” combines scientific inquiry with pleas for
liberation. Likewise, Heinrich Hössli’s two-volume work Eros (1836−1838)
reads as well as a defense of male-male love. And any list must include
 Introduction liii

the first lesbian activist, Anna Rüling, (Theodora “Theo” Anna Sprüngli,
1888−1953) who later in 1904 at the Scientific Humanitarian Committee,
a group dedicated to liberating diverse sexualities, was the first and only
person to acknowledge and address lesbian sexuality, going so far as to come
out herself to the group.
For the editors and contributors of the volume cited above, most
striking about Foucault’s groundbreaking History of Sexuality is its essentially
Franco-centric perspective. “In light of all this prodigious investment [in
Germany] in the deployment of sexuality in its various forms, it is curi-
ous that Foucault wrote so little about it directly” (Spector 3). More than
merely redirect attention to the German examples, the editors of After the
History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and beyond Foucault turn back
the clock, looking to extend the genealogical traces of the pathologization
of sexuality. Their investigation of proto-formulations of same-sex desire in
Reformation Germany, as well as viable arguments for tracing conceptual-
izations of modern sexuality as far back as the early modern period of the
Holy Roman Empire, indicate how complex, fluid, and resistant to any
stable tracking a history of sexuality is.31
This does not excuse ahistorical approaches to literary and cultural
production with respect to this topic in particular. What I propose, instead,
is to think seriously about what a queer history might look like. Or rather,
how organizing and pursuing messianic echoes offers a disjunctive history,
in full display of the provisional character of any trajectory. I attempt to
perform and thus offer a genealogy that suggests one way to reactivate a
potentiality sacrificed in the quest for citizenship and societal approbation.
The organization of the manuscript thus brings together a series of texts
and films to track the pathologization of same-sex desire and to explore a
queer history by listening for echoes of what it means to not have not loved.
This also means that my stated emphasis on strictly German texts from
the earlier period is somewhat overstated. The energies that I am tracking
can hardly be expected to recognize strict “national” boundaries, especially
during a period when Germany was not yet a nation. Rather, such ener-
gies are distributed more broadly and include, as we will see, texts such as
Frankenstein. But the epicenter of my interest is still primarily in German
narratives of that period.
The focus on this period needs no other justification than to note,
as Beacher does, that the very vocabulary still in use today to describe a
variety of psychological conditions finds its origins in this period. Many of
the early sexologists, Robert Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud found their
liv Introduction

most compelling examples in literature. And it stands to reason that the

period just before and contemporaneous with the development of a sexologi-
cal vocabulary would discover in literature a rich repository of examples. I
think it fair to say that sexologists bring to consciousness what was exhibited
in several of these texts.
The first chapter, “A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster: Mary Shel-
ley’s Frankenstein,” actually looks outside of the strictly German context to
consider the significance of monstrosity or monsters in emerging bourgeois
society at the beginning of the nineteenth century. More than the creature’s
fascination with Werther—a connection reexamined in chapter 4—is the
power of the monster to expose the ideological pressures that seek to reaffirm
family and nationalistic values in the face of a something, hovering about
the margins, that threatens such a nice recomposition of the Swiss Family
Frankenstein, with respect both to the gendered roles of its members and
thus to its legacy. As such, the novel signals in a different direction that
remains unexplored or rejected; namely, what would it mean for the self to
surrender willingly to its own monstrosity—to the forces that disable fam-
ily, generation, and the colonialist ambitions of nascent nation states. The
refusal of the text to pursue these potentialities finds an apt metaphor in
Walton deciding to abandon his quest once he realizes someone has already
been there before him. It signals—more than just sympathy for his crew—a
refusal to greet an Other on its terms, on its turf.
Before seeking out traces of this other way, I turn to an oft-discussed
but easily dismissed text from the traditional German canon, Peter Schlemihl:
And His Wondrous History (Peter Schlemihl und seine wundersame Geschichte)
in chapter 2, “Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story or the Genesis of a Queer
Jewish Outlaw.” Interest here lies in the manner in which different social
pressures coalesce to produce what can easily be seen as the proto-closeted
homosexual. Throughout this introduction references have been made to
assemblages of power, how different, even conflicting pressures can be
brought together to mutually reinforce each other under the unfailing eye
of the panopticon. In this example, the Jew seeking emancipation finds his
ambitions at odds with the parochial, nativist traditions of German-speaking
lands not yet ready to embrace bourgeois capitalism and of course, not
yet a nation. These competing pressures serve to awaken a reimagining of
the Jew as queer, as introducing an unnatural desire into society that per-
manently renders the Jew unfit for interaction with upstanding folk. The
attempt to distinguish the Jew, now dressed for success in the West, from
his German neighbors leads to a new distinction that sets the Jew up for
 Introduction lv

being pathologically different and a decisive threat to the folkish values of

Germany. My interest, of course, is less in what is the eventual fate of the
Jew so marked, and more in how it offers one genesis of homosexuality, but
by no means an exclusive one. How the other, castigated and demonized
in Frankenstein, requires damnation of another sort, once his appearance
is less jolting, finds a chartable map in Chamisso’s story. But it also sets
up the possibility for disassembling that assemblage, for disentangling the
strands that come to define and (over)determine the fate of the outsider. It
thus allows for the possibility for the outsider to find a proper outside, to
escape from the immanence exhibited in Frankenstein.
Framed alternately, to what extent is Frankenstein’s creation the not-
yet-realized of sexual otherness? One answer to this question is visible in the
intersection of power relations and relations of power in “Peter Schlemihl’s
Wondrous Story.” A network of reciprocally reenforcing practices—visible in
society’s treatment of the Jewish parvenu Schlemihl—generates a new kind
of degenerate who over the course of the nineteenth century comes to be
identified as the homosexual. This is not the only possible genesis, since a
central conceit of this project is the impossibility of presenting a history of
sexuality. As a series of acts, numerous combinatory possibilities exist and
continue to persist as a potentiality with each act.
Just as significant, the text establishes a framework for consideration
of the queer possibilities presented by one of the canon’s queerest or most
inscrutable texts, Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater.” That
possibility is explored in chapter 3: “Queer Prosthetics or Male Tribadism in
Kleist’s ‘On the Puppet Theater.’ ” On the one hand, following the closeting
of the “homosexual” in Peter Schlemihl, it becomes possible to de-code the
text, as one critic has done, to uncover a discourse loaded with innuendo
and euphemism. To be sure, the emergence of warm brothers in Berlin—or
shall we say a secret society of men with men or boys—would generate a
coded discourse.32 On the other hand, such an approach merely appropri-
ates the fundamental assumptions emerging about queers. It situates “queer”
identity on a terrain defined by the prevailing discourse and its inherited
values. Instead, I accept the text’s invitation to defy the possibility of fixing
meaning to any of its many gnomic statements. The terrain is thus prepared
to reimagine potentialities that come to be lost once interpretive discourses
seek to stabilize the text’s playful subversion of interpretive consistency.
The potentiality of that terrain is actualized by Johann Goethe’s The
Sorrows of Young Werther. How is it possible that a text composed thirty
years before Kleist’s can be thought to have responded to or answered a
lvi Introduction

call that has yet to be articulated? Already established is that the past is
recovered or reimagined to redeem a past that never actually occurred but
could have. If talk about marionettes could disentangle the interpretive
certainty that would link securely sign and signified, Goethe’s text comes
to exploit that potentiality, one that remained unreconstructed until Roland
Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse. And his reading of The Sorrows of Young Werther
is the subject of chapter 4, “Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces: Roland
Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse and Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s The Sorrows of
Young Werther.” Let me clarify. In a book comprised almost entirely of cita-
tions and intertexts, Barthes most often lifts from Werther. Nietzsche, while
not as frequently cited, is an equally important interlocutor for Barthes,
specifically Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same. Barthes’s text thus poses
the very provocative question of what would it mean for Werther, whose
life ends in suicide, to accept Nietzsche’s challenge and embrace a life that
will end again and again and again in suicide. These echoes in Goethe’s
text allow for a reimagining of a lover’s discourse in a reconstituted past
that gestures toward a love that could never have been realized at the time
it was written or, in fact, at any time. Queer echoes need time to traverse
great spaces, and preserved in that time is a love that never quite speaks its
name, never makes any full disclosure.
The final chapter, “ ‘I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.’: Echoes of a Queer
Messianic in Brokeback Mountain,” is something of a coda, leaping to the
present to explore what messianic echoes might be retrievable. To be sure,
nothing would seem further removed from Frankenstein’s laboratory in
Ingolstadt than Brokeback Mountain in the American West. If the expecta-
tion was an imagining of a very real politic to counter the current politic
of appeasement, none is forthcoming. Rather, the purpose is to understand
or hear how such echoes persist into a very different present, preserving
the possibility that a queerness will arrive to rupture scenes of marital gay
bliss. The fundamental wager of this study is that the energies reanimated
in the earlier chapters have considerable and vital resonances today that can
help us rethink our current politics. While America, of course, has been
the center of the gay rights movement at least since Stonewall, the primary
reason for looking at this film in particular is how it recaptures the messianic
echoes of the previous chapters and rearticulates them in such fashion that
marriage (equality) is already foreclosed, therefore necessitating a thinking
about queer relationships that goes in a different direction, that goes West
to the undiscovered backside of Brokeback Mountain.
 1

A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

In Bill Condon’s 1998 film Gods and Monsters the relationship between the
god and his creation comes undone. If expectations dictate that the surrogate
monster or its newest version bear the hideous physical deformities of his
predecessor, the figure upon whom the cinematic creator of Frankenstein
or the film’s protagonist directs his affections inspires thoughts of a beauty
so sublime that it becomes monstrous only potentially. As a retelling of
the final days of Frankenstein’s cinematic creator, James Whale, the film
explores the homoerotic affections aroused by a gardener who comes to
embody Whale’s own monstrous hopes in the form of an angelic monster.
The monster’s beauty deforms and debases its creator; its masculine beauty
combined with a fetching naïveté evinces a god-like simplicity at whose
hands James Whale would like to be destroyed. “Kill me, Kill me,” he
pleads with his monster as he mounts and gropes him in a final desperate
attempt to inspire his imagined creation to end his creator’s life. The mon-
ster, while not the laboratory kind with a massive body and reach, has no
trouble refusing the advance and repudiating the one who imagined him
as his monstrous creation. In this version, which is really not a treatment
of Frankenstein but of his cinematic creator’s final days and his attempt
to reanimate his long-lost monster, the gardener’s physical beauty endows
him with monstrous possibilities. Whale’s mental decline serves to elevate
his new monster to god-like status, but only by merging his image with so
many images out of a catalogue of lovers from his past that never were, loves
that could never have been. Even the delicate Tadzio—we might recall—is

1
2 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

seen as monstrous by his admirer. In other words, divorced from scenes

of a family romance, divorced from domestic entanglements, the monster
comes to be god-like in its physical being; monstrous is the desire of the
beholder. And if Mary Shelley’s monster could identify with Milton’s Satan,
that relation, too, is reversed. Satanic is the homoerotic desire that projects
god-like potential, the potential to kill with its beauty, onto a creation of
its own making or of its mind’s making.
Monsters and homosexuals will hardly be strangers to each other
as sexology in the nineteenth century advances in naming its other.1 But
for the original author of Frankenstein, the monster’s grotesque deformity
affrights from the start. There is no courting at the opera,2 no imagining
of god-like beauty in an angel of death. Instead, the monster is hideous.
Or, so Mary Shelley described her own creation in the 1831 preface to the
novel, it is “supremely frightful,” “a horrid thing,” and most famously of
all in her description of the novel itself, “my hideous progeny (1831, ix).”3
Admittedly, the comparison between Mary Shelley’s monster/novel and
any of its cinematic adaptations is awkward and asymmetrical. Who do we
align with whom? In the example above, a film about James Whale is not a
film about Frankenstein that might serve as a neat vehicle for comparison.
But as Mary Shelley’s own description of her work suggests, the monster is
viewed through or is a product of numerous screens or narrative frames.4
Simply put, he or it is as much a product of scrambled mediation as it is
of assembled body parts. So, how might it to be that whatever scrambling
occurs between the novel’s penning and say “Death in Venice” that the
monster comes to awe with its beauty? In no way do I mean to suggest
that a historical shift that can be documented with respect to numerous
texts marking a historical or linear transformation. On the contrary, I set the
argument up in this fashion to pose and pursue the following question: to
what extent does Mary Shelley’s novel propose, foreclose, and delimit pos-
sible relations with the monster that are espied by the shift described above?
That is, the radical reimagining of relations with Dr. Frankenstein’s monster
underscores, I argue, two things: (1) monsters have an untapped potential,
which (2) comes to be de-potentialized through attempts to reinscribe the
body into the social order. Mary Shelley’s text, as the vast literature attests,
pulls in countless directions, accommodating or speaking to numerous critical
approaches and interpretive strategies. Nothing can contain the signifying
possibilities of the monster; it exceeds proper registration (“Who can describe
their horror and consternation on beholding me?” [1818, 97]). It recalls the
textual dappling witnessed near the end of Visconti’s film, Death in Venice.
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 3

At the same time, a pentimento emerges in the text that seeks to confine,
exile, or just destroy the monster in service of preserving a nuclear family,
wedded to the very institutions that will come to marginalize, criminalize,
and demonize the homosexual as a type. While it is true that the “turbu-
lent energies” of the text “overwhelm any ideology we may discern in it”
(M. Brown 145), the pressure to relieve that turbulence—to domesticate
the monster that is also the text—provides a very early indication of how
assemblages of such energies work to construct a rather thoroughly modern
monster in terms of its sexual energies and their orientation. This chapter
will trace the tensions that run throughout the novel and conclude with
arguing how such tensions, left unresolved, offer a reading that resists the
pressures of the family and its restoration. In other words, what would it
mean to befriend the monster rather than seek to contain or destroy it?

What Are Monsters for in Destitute Times?

The central claim of this chapter is that monsters are not simply a marker
of something that exceeds identification and “determinations of truth and
falsity” (M. Brown 157), but rather the determinations employed to regis-
ter such monstrosity reveal a fault line in the social order particular to its
time as well. Walton’s description of the monster at the end of the novel
participates in this attempt to register what he freely admits he cannot. As
he confronts the monster, he both disavows any capacity to see or describe
the creature and also engages in what he has just disavowed. “Over [Fran-
kenstein] hung a form which I cannot find words to describe: gigantic in
stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions” (Shelley1818, 155).
Whatever aphasia grips Walton as he beholds the creature for the first time,
it nevertheless allows for a rapid recovery of that very language.
The initial description is followed by more detail, save his face, which
is covered “by long locks of ragged hair.” If prosopopoeia, putting a face
on that which one reads, is ultimately what is at stake in this text or any
text, the rigging together of collected body parts to create a monster does
not allow for it to be read. Whether we consider Victor’s attempt to create
a superhuman in his own image or Mary Shelley’s work as caught up in
putting a face to a woman writer who must also disguise or question her
own ambition, the face that comes to be put on Frankenstein’s monster is
not flattering to the self or selves that would seek to get a read on their own
creation. Walton’s (non)description at the end of the novel is unambiguous:
4 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

“Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome, yet
appalling hideousness. I shut my eyes involuntarily” (Shelley1818, 163).
The face that asks to be read and understood, to join in the community
of readers, reflects a hideous text that registers the contradictory and over-
determined impulses that underwrite the novel. To be sure, Walton is not
Dr. Frankenstein. The monster is not his creation, and unlike the doctor,
he has already agreed to listen to his crew and end his mission. But as one
who has confessed a special penchant for Frankenstein, who recognizes in
Victor a soul mate, the object or creature that accounts for their coming
together is monstrous. What allows for Walton to assert that he has found
a man, who before his spirit “had been broken by misery, I should have
been happy to have possessed as the brother of my heart,” is a monster
(Shelley 1818, 10). Already, we have a friendship premised on the impos-
sible: Were it not for the monster, the two would never have found each
other, but the one who appears to Walton as his soulmate is one who can
only be reconstructed or reassembled from the remnants of his broken spirit.
Walton reanimates Victor’s lost soul for purposes of claiming the friend
that since childhood he has always longed for. That brings him face to face
with the monster but only after his soulmate has been crushed. The sug-
gestion is that the attractive and repellant forces that drive relationships in
the text not only demand negotiation with the monster but also a ceding
of authorship to the monster. In other words, there is a reversal here. The
monster appears to be the work of a mad scientist, and if extended to the
text, the progeny of a woman author. At the same time, the monster appears
to have always been at work in the text, a generative and uncontainable
force that exceeds all limits. To return to the concept of prosopopoeia, there
are so many faces to be read in the text, so many (auto)biographical tales
and traces that any face, any reading, is immediately replaced, eliminated,
or transformed by another.5
Peter Brooks, for one, has situated the problem in the creature’s inability
to negotiate the symbolic order through access to an outside imaginary.6
Having had no mother, Frankenstein never experiences a mirror stage; his
entry into language is strictly as a voyeur born of the necessity to compensate
for his ugliness. The point is that much stronger when one considers the
shortage of mothers in the text, or the prevalence of dead mothers and their
surrogates. His hopeless tarrying in the symbolic is recognizable in how he
comes to inhabit language. What he witnesses through the peephole and
then reports in French is what is taught to an Arab in a German-speaking
region rendered in English. (Shelley 1818, 85−105). But whatever attempts
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 5

the creature makes at self-cultivation, nothing can arrest the horror of his
physical presence. Language(s) moves through various modes and styles of
articulation, but no law governs its erratic movements. Moreover, the elision
of Oedipal nuclei also results in a lack of real sexual difference. In Milton’s
Paradise Lost, Eve, according to Brooks, discovers God’s law which is also
the law of sexual difference and the rule of the phallus (Brooks 88). For
Frankenstein’s creature, the request for a bride is feckless, even were she
completed. “The wife represents only sexual difference but no imaginary.”
The result is an “uncontestable metonymic movement of desire through
the narrative signifying chain, whose resistance to closure is evinced by the
many narrative frames of the novel” (Brooks 97).7
Frankenstein is not to be beheld. The lifeless remains of his victims
speak to his being or having been, as do his kind deeds performed for the
DeLacey’s during the cover of night, but his presence remains insufferable,
universally so: “Oh no mortal could support the horror of that countenance”
(1818, 32). He exists as a trace or “a dreaded specter—just as surely as he
tracks Frankenstein and his family (1818, 3). But deprived of an imaginary,
that trace threatens full exposure of a monstrosity, or is given full exposure
by the doctor.

The Swiss Family Frankenstein

The monster that comes to animate the scenes of the novel also comes to
both secure and unsecure family ties, or what the text calls “the silken cord.”8
In describing his life to his new-found wannabe soulmate, Victor explains
that his early life was “so guided by a silken cord that all seemed but one
train of enjoyment for me” (1818,14). Such days of bliss are enabled or
even directed by luxurious woven strands of fabric that bind like with like.
Generational continuity is tied to the image of a delicate cord that ropes
the family in, keeps them together and on a straight path. “The family
is a rehearsal space for the exclusionary attitudes of the privatized public
sphere” (Komisaruk 441). While that space shelters those like Elizabeth, who
“appear[] of a different stock” from those of her common fellow orphans, the
cord does not extend to true outsiders to pull them into a protected space.9
No such law or silken cord directs and orients the monster’s move-
ments through language and landscape, exposing an ugliness inadmissible
and absolutely fatal to the endogamous dreams of family. The threat such
a free-floating trace poses is succinctly stated by the monster after the
6 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

description of his first murder, “I too can create desolation; my enemy is

not invulnerable” (Shelley 1818, 97). Nowhere more directly are the stakes
of this reversal stated than by the monster upon demanding that Victor
continue to prepare a bride for him: “You are my creator, but I am your
master,—obey!” (Shelley 1818, 116). And he won’t leave: “The form of the
monster on whom I had bestowed existence was forever before my eyes . . .”
(Shelley 1818, 35). A death drive inhabits the monster once his traces are
reanimated as creation and exposes the tenuous bonds that make possible a
future or future relations. The monster, as much as he traverses the various
sign systems of his tormentors, must be contained or killed off. Truth values
must be reanimated if the family’s legacy is to continue.
But who really wins, should the monster be killed off? The monster’s
deadly impulses, stemming from rejection of his outward form, inspire the
same impulses in his father or creator. Ridding himself of the monster—by
begetting him a bride or destroying him—might allow the doctor “to claim
Elizabeth, and forget the past in union with her,” but it also requires that
he remain “a slave of the creature” (Shelley 1818, 104, 116) who comes to
inhabit all the deathly impulses that threaten the family in the same way
storms appear in Switzerland—“suddenly and in several places at once”
(Shelley 1818, 18). The Frankenstein family needs protection from one of
its own creations, and that relation locks them in a life-and-death battle
that makes creator and creation, master and slave, interchangeable. If the
narrative frames did not already confuse who is really speaking for whom
(To what extent is the monster’s eloquence Frankenstein’s creation, both
the creature’s capacity for such and its story as reinterpreted by the highly
educated Victor?), the monster’s wild movement through various sign systems
and landscape threatens to affect all:

The sleeper stirred; a thrill of terror ran though me. Should he

indeed awake [. . .] and denounce the murderer? Thus she would
assuredly act, if her darkened eyes opened. The thought [. . .]
stirred the fiend within me . . . the murder I have committed
because I am forever robbed of all that she could give me, she
shall atone. (Shelley 1818, 98)

The murder of which he speaks, of course, is that of the young Felix,

the son of DeLacey; the new victim is Justine, who rather than being mur-
dered on the spot is set up. Since she does not see the monster, she must
presume her own guilt. Once again the visual register prevails, but this time
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 7

the game of appearances shifts. Rather than see the monster and misjudge
his acquisition of and potential for Bildung by running in terror, Justine
can conceive or fathom the monster only after the fact, from whatever evi-
dence he might have left behind, which, of course, only leads to a wrong
conclusion about Felix’s murder. The sleeper’s stirring stirs the fiend within
the monster to act; the transfer of stirring from sleeper to murderer also
creates confusion among the victims. Now, Justine and not Frankenstein
or his monster must atone. Now, Justine is the thief and murderer. Finally,
the unseen monster is equal to the threat aroused by his appearance. The
monster is unfairly condemned by his appearance that belies his potential
or innate goodness; Justine is condemned for murder because of planted
evidence and confusion which is misread as consistent with guilt. The pres-
sures of the text to render visual signs reliable implies that the monster’s
appearance must reflect his true self. He must be rejected and scorned to
ignite his rage and ensure that his acts bespeak the horror of his assembled
parts. That is to say, the birthrights of the scion of one of Switzerland’s
most distinguished families gets something in return from the monster. As
we will see, whatever attendant threats the monster poses, something about
a family that has as many Oedipal substitutions as this one, (“your cousin
who has been like a sister should become your wife”), seems to require the
monster to set relationships straight even as he destroys them.10

Monsters among Us

The monster has no name; no proper appellation cleaves to that which

exceeds the possibilities of language. As such, a plethora of descriptive words
stand in for the name: “monster,” “fiend,” “daemon,” “creature,” “wretch,”
“devil,” “odious companion” and “dreaded spectre.” And insofar as “monster”
or “creature” might succeed as a “nameless mode of naming the unimagi-
nable,” that gap opened up by arriving at the limits of naming when faced
by the monster “forms a space that produces the conditions for the produc-
tion and proliferation of names. . . . The monster, as an unspeakable (__),
constitutes the space that is necessary for writing to begin . . . the writing
before writing” (Botting 68).
The observation, moreover, implicates the text, its actual production,
as much as it does the monster alone. If the monster preconditions all
writing as writing, then he inhabits the very text that sought to exile him.
Note how names circulate in the text. Margaret Saville/Mary Shelley is
8 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

quite obvious. A similar clarity and lack of such occurs with the name(s)
or missing name(s) of the author on each addition. And since not being
able to name (as Justine cannot) the nameless or unnamable implicates the
silenced speaker, the risk attendant to a proliferation of names that fails
to name its enabling/disabling power carries serious risks. That identity is
very much a legal construct, comprised, for example, of birth certificates,
passports, wedding certificates, and arrest records, suggests how tethered to
taming the threat posed by namelessness a society is. In fact, the common
practice that often mistakes Dr. Frankenstein for his monster indicates that a
complete reversal of values or relationships is in the balance. “But where were
my friends and relatives? No father had watched my infant days . . . what
was I?” (Shelley 1818, 80). Names secure family ties, as do family ties,
names. That is to say, both revolve around a center whose name dare not
and cannot be spoken. Unhinged from the tethers of a society organized
around “rank, descent, and noble blood,” the monster is also that which
languages have yet to name. He is a representative of something that can
only be named by reference to an existing list of substantives; as such, he
has no claims to an authorized or authenticated existence (Shelly 1818, 79).
This contagion threatens the entire semantic field, contributing to the
upheaval in truth values inaugurated by Frankenstein’s creature. As Bernhard
Duyfhuizen observes, polypotons, the repetition of words from the same
root, are strewn throughout the text. The example he uses is particularly
trenchant, specifically the shifting values that come to be associated with the
word “wretch,” from the Old English wrecca, meaning “exile” (Duyfhuizen
483–86). Already it has been noted that the creature is exiled from human
society since he lacks documentary proof of his existence and drifts outside
communities defined and sustained by bloodlines. But the polysemic traces
of the wretch, of the exile, infiltrate virtually every relationship in the text.
It is worth rehearsing with some detail Duyfhuizen’s tracking of the word’s
textual migrations. Shelley’s conclusion to her introduction, “And now, once
again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper,” already advances a
metonymic chain in conflicting but telling directions. The apostrophe could
refer to the text or to Victor Frankenstein. The monster, whose hideousness is
extreme enough to deny him any consideration or kindness, is not a possible
referent, insofar that the monster is incapable of prosperous reproduction. Still,
even the elimination of any threat of offspring, even the apparent certainty
that the monster’s lineage ends with one generation, offers no security from
the threat. Already, creator and creation/text have become interchangeably
hideous, long after the monster has been slain or the novel completed. No
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 9

wonder Victor refuses the wretched creature’s request for a bride. His fear
that the monster and his bride might not be true to the monster’s word
seems less unreasonable but no less unenforceable. Any kind of union with
the monster threatens further dissemination of its destructive energies.
The first use of “wretch,” however, has nothing to do with the monster
per se but rather with his contagion. During his first encounter with Victor,
Walton observes, “I never saw a man in so wretched a condition” (1818,
8). Several substitutions are at work here; among them is the transition
from hideous to wretched. The origins of hideous are informative insofar
as the Greek root “keu” addresses sound but also the Germanic “skow” or
to show. The monster, that which shows as it warns, is first hideous; that
whose repulsiveness shows itself and is heard becomes wretched or that
which is exiled. What obtains, however, is not a wall to prevent re-entry
of the exile, but rather a modality of substitutions that is as constitutive of
the monster’s destructive faculty as the parts or meaning of those parts are.
Moreover, Victor’s description provides a positive prognosis. After returning
from exile to the company of Walton, Victor shows signs of “benevolence
and sweetness that I [Walton] never saw equaled” (Shelley 1818, 8). Care
“lightens up Victor’s whole countenance,” which, if maintained or readily
summoned, such face would allow him to be in the company of or face to
face with others (Shelley 1818, 8). The monster’s countenance, on the other
hand, cannot show what his benevolent words might communicate. Such
words then circulate aimlessly with no facial expression or means of display
to anchor them, particularly as long as ugliness of that sort must be hidden.
The monster can neither be confronted (his hideousness overwhelms.) nor can
he be sent into exile. He can traverse whatever distances, obstacles, trenches,
and fences are erected between him and his target; and his presence, as in
the example above, is always perceived in his absence.
He inhabits the metonymic chain, or by disrupting that chain he
generates uncontainable strains of its contagion. “Wretched,” for example,
appears in the description of his father’s rescue of his “most intimate friend”
Beaufort, who after falling into poverty sought recluse in Lucerne where he
lived “in wretchedness” (Shelley 1818, 13).
The semantic transfer offers a peculiar distinction. Living in wretched-
ness, the friend inspires Victor’s father to come to his aid. Being a wretch,
as is the monster, is instead hopeless. Still, the old man succumbs to his
illness, which then allows the father to marry the friend’s daughter. How
sweet! Wretchedness, at least, sponsors a new family romance. And such
romance will eventually allow (depending on the edition) the intimate friend’s
10 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

daughter cum wife to adopt an impoverished child/niece who stood out

from the others due to a “celestial stamp in all her features,” particularly
her hair, “which was the brightest living gold” [like a silken cord] (Shelley
1818, 15). That, of course, is Elizabeth, who in turn becomes Victor’s sister/
cousin/bride. But whoever has seen wretchedness is, it would seem, forever
tainted. Whoever whisking-away from wretchedness saves, e.g., Elizabeth or
the waif Caroline, still infects, is still tainted. After all, it is the picture of
Caroline, the mother, on the body of the innocent adopted child/servant
Justine that becomes the key piece of incriminating evidence. Of course, it
is planted there by the monster, who in this instance literalizes his destruc-
tion of secured sign systems. The dead mother circulates, as her image now
serves to condemn one she had previously saved.
Duyfhuizen’s tracking of the numerous other traces of “wretch” is
worth citing here:

After the first naming of the Creature “the wretch” (57), the
frequency of the term or its polyoptic derivatives skyrockets with
appearances in nearly every chapter—in all, sixty-one occurrences
of “wretch” or of a derivative such as “wretched,” “wretchedness,”
“wretchedly” (“wreck” occurs three more times). (Duhuzien 484)

Of course, not merely the frequency of the word points to the wretched
one’s capacity to spread wretchedness, but also grammatical and syntactical
migrations suggest how easily the monster’s disease adapts to new environ-
ments. Take, for instance, the description Victor offers of Justine’s trial
(“During the whole of this wretched mockery of justice I suffered living
torture . . .” [Shelley 1818, 50]) and the reasons given for withholding from
Elizabeth news of Victor’s illness after he has faced his creation (“. . . How
wretched my sickness would make Elizabeth” [1818, 35]). Nothing in itself
about either of these usages of the word surprises; they exist as possibilities
within language before the wretch himself comes to existence. His traces
have inhabited language before he comes to be. What requires asking then
is just what is it about the various sociopolitical discourses underwriting
the text that brings the monster to creation out of the traces he has always
already strewn throughout language and languages? What is it about the
wrecked wretch or the wretched wreck (of the West) that calls him forth
out of his textual traces at this particular moment of the text’s composition,
which moment, of course, is already moments, given the text’s numerous
revisions and editions?11
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 11

A crossing of registers occurs here. On the one hand, hideousness and

murderous acts account for the monster’s threat; on the other, that threat
disrupts the symbolic order exemplified by the polyoptons noted above. It
might suffice then to simply assert that the text performs its own monstrosity
or that the actual writing of the text is its own monster, its hideous progeny.
That also means, however, that Mary Shelley’s monster stages its own gen-
esis amid the contingencies, historical and local, that condition its writing.
While much has been written that casts the tensions that exist between
Victor’s time away from home creating and pursuing a monster and the
apparent domestic tranquility that calls him back home, or between the
self-seclusion of one driven to “discover the hidden laws of nature” (Shelley
1818, 16) and the outward magnificence of Geneva and its surroundings,
such observations merely juxtapose the blissful domestic complementarity
between spouses with the Promethean ambitions of the male spouse seeking
“a final cause of all things” (Shelley 1818, 19). But the family’s preferred
residence on the eastern shore of the lake “in considerable seclusion” (Shelley
1818, 19) suggests that Victor’s choice is not as distinct as it might seem;
he is to choose between two kinds of isolation. The choice is not between
a social and an asocial existence but rather between living among one’s own
or with oneself and an “other.”
This binary is evident as well elsewhere. The monster, as we will see,
embodies a battle of the sexes whose governing conflict is between fathers
and mothers. For when we factor in that the novel itself is a monster, a
hideous progeny, the complementarity suggested by Victor and his long-time
friend and future colonialist Clerval may seem neat and tidy, but the scenes
of that conflict, the very writing of the novel, already create a family drama
in which not all the constituent or psychic parts fit or accommodate each
other. The monster can no longer be seen, as merely the embodiment of a
desire to exclude the feminine, but one that is also the embodiment of the
feminine still seeking a genre or voice of its own. The authority granted the
scientist Victor is contested in some fashion by Mary Shelley’s own coming
to be or writing of herself in the text.
The monster comes to be the expression of the will that seeks its own
completion in a mirroring self-sameness. He threatens the domestic front
by toppling the patriarch. In a remarkable piece of analysis, William Vedeer
lists the order of the monster’s victims as they proceed backward through a
portion of the alphabet: William, Justine, Henry, Elizabeth, Alphonse. The
progression also corresponds to an increased level of familial ties, ending
with the father and thus the law of the household (Shelley 152–53). After
12 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

Alphonse, there is nowhere else to go. The monster has uprooted the patri-
archy, and its remains, as we will see in the course of the next two chapters,
come to reconstitute a new kind of monster: the homosexual.

I arrived at Geneva. My father and Ernest yet lived . . . I see [my

father] now, excellent and venerable old man! his eyes wandered
in vacancy, for they had lost their charm and their delight—his
Elizabeth, his more than daughter, whom he doted on with all
that affection which a man feels . . . in the decline of life. . . .
Cursed, cursed be the fiend that brought misery on his grey hairs
and doomed him to waste in wretchedness! (Shelley 1818, 139).

Shortly thereafter, Alphonse dies in Victor’s arms. The implications of the

quote are not too complex. Frankenstein has created the wretch whose
wretchedness has spread and doomed the father. Just as interesting are the
grammatical shifts in the passage: from the past tense to the present tense
to the putative and then back to the past tense. If such shifts recall the
semantic migrations discussed earlier with “wretch” and suggest a temporal-
ity equally in flux, such fluidity contrasts with the closeness of the family
romance in which Elizabeth is something more than just a daughter to
her adoptive father. As we will see, what Vedeer compartmentalizes as Eros
or as a destructive bond between two men, could just as easily be read as
marking a series of displacements that hide other unrealized possibilities for
coming together. The patricide apparently at the apex of the family drama
obscures and also throws into relief the matricides or the making disappear
of mothers that supplies the texts with energies that seek to break out of the
family romance. Uprooting the patriarchy—and that is how Vedeer sees the
monster’s murderous acts—presupposes a matricide to foreclose possibilities
of fathers producing heirs.

Mary Shelley’s Progeny

As effectively as psychoanalytic approaches such as Vedeer’s situate the novel

in Mary Shelley’s own struggle with a husband who exhibited the kind of
wretchedness depicted in the novel, anchoring the dynamics of the story in
a psychoanalytic biography elides the biographical struggle that, according to
Barbara Johnson, is the novel itself.12 The experiencing of the novel or of its
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 13

writing points to events that exceed the limits of a biographical approach;

Mary is also becoming Mary in the novel, and that Mary becomes a dif-
ferent one with each revision. Such an elision points to an equally critical
issue. If for Vedeer androgyny promises domestic bliss, a healthy union of
engendered traits, it just as likely obscures or dismisses possibilities outside
the domestic sphere that might speak to a different kind of monster, one
less tied to a binary opposition of the sexes and their eventual union in
marital bliss.
Just how imbricated in each other are the monstrosities of writing
and of creaturely creation goes well beyond the author’s confession in the
introduction that links the hideousness of the novel with that of the mon-
ster. As Johnson so eloquently argues, female authorship and an unbridled
“male” drive for the absolute each have monsters to show for their efforts.
But what further links the two activities is that both offer primal scenes of
creation (Johnson 3). If Victor Frankenstein sets out to eliminate the mother
by conceiving and giving birth without one, he is also the product of a text
that maps the dual struggle of a female autobiographer: (1) “to resist the
pressure of masculine autobiography as the only available genre, and (2) to
describe the difficulty of conforming to a female ideal that is the product
of the male imagination” (Johnson10). More to the point, the monster is
over-determined; he is to be Victor’s expression of the perfect creation, but
at the same time the monster that is the text registers the hideous predica-
ment of women seeking to fashion a self that is not merely a product of
the male imagination. As Victor’s creation the monster may threaten the
family, but the hideous progeny that in the text exposes a monstrosity has
already taken root in the family and looks to its own monstrous or hideous
self to escape the pressures of conforming to a male idea.
The horror story offers a genre that brings the two, author and mad
scientist, together in scenes or acts of matricide. Or rather, the female auto-
biographer working through the horrors of creation and procreation finds a
suitable vehicle for expression in the scientist who dreams of carrying the
corpse of his dead fiancée cum mother. That the horror of beholding the
monster alive for the first time is accompanied by the dream of holding
his dead mother provides a striking image of how monsters and mothers
don’t mix. As Frankenstein’s description of the dream to Walton suggests,
he becomes the monster who puts the seal of death on the fiancée/cousin,
and as her lips begin to favor the same hue as the monster’s, she becomes
the mother, dead in the arms of the son who brought to life that which,
14 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

at least in the dream, substitutes for the plague, namely Victor’s kiss. As
he imprinted “the first kiss on her [Elizabeth’s] lips, they become livid with
the hue of death; her features appeared to change and I thought I held the
corpse of my dead mother in my arms” (Shelley 1818, 32). Yet this mother,
as we recall, is the one who died while nursing and giving a second life
to the stricken, adopted daughter Elizabeth. The implication of the dream
might well be that the doctor has contracted a disease that kills women;
his trafficking with the monster is what gives birth to the plague that has
already killed the mother. In other words, the threat posed to mothers by
the plague is already implicated in a family drama that has yet to play out.
The monster is born only after he has arrived, only thus can the threat be
contained or identified. For Verdeer the eventual goal of the monster is to
eliminate the patriarch, but preceding the series of murders that leads to
Alphonse, a matricide or dreams of one have already taken hold.
Indeed, mothers are at extreme risk in the novel. Johnson’s claim
that the text is Mary’s experience of a woman negotiating the difficulties
of fashioning an autobiographical self, which is always already subjected to
conventions of male authorship, means the mother is always displaced or
silenced. Caroline is without a mother, a condition that allows Alphonse to
marry her, once her father’s financial ruin leads him to an early death. All
of this was made possible because the father had been among Alphonse’s
most trusted friends. The restoration of some kind of family out of those
ruins requires another act of selective kindness to complete what will become
the quaint nuclear family of four, namely the adoption of the blond orphan
Elizabeth. Of course, Elizabeth repays her adoptive mother by infecting her
with scarlet fever, which then results in the death of another mother. The
monster’s repeated warning to the doctor, “I shall be with you on your wed-
ding night,” ensures that the maiden Elizabeth will never become a mother
(Shelley 1818, 117). Any hopes for the monster to produce offspring die
when Frankenstein destroys his bride. Autobiography, self-creation, cannot
abide mothers and brides.
Simply refusing the task is apparently not sufficient. Frankenstein
can only recognize the dangers inherent in the monster’s wish after he
has begun to see the bride take shape. “[O]ne of the first results of those
sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be children, and a race
of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very
existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror”
(Shelley 1818, 115). Such belated recognition of the bride’s possibility
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 15

of becoming a mother supplies the compensatory pleasure of destroying

the incalculable female counterpart of his monster and any possibility for
producing offspring. So, when Johnson asserts that all the autobiographies
inscribed in the text (Walton, Frankenstein, the monster) are mirrors of
the character’s transgressions, those transgressions are linked to the death
or disappearance of mothers.
While reducing the various threats to the family to a singular desire
for a kind of matricide risks overlooking the other historical currents that
contribute to the instability of the Swiss Family Frankenstein, we need only
recall the various familial roles assumed by Elizabeth to gauge the breaks
or potential break that the monster introduces in the silken. Her versatility
helps preserve the family in the name of agape, a pure love whose purity
is anchored in the purity of bloodlines, even if it means that line zigzags
through generations as one player plays many parts:

Alphonse: I confess, my son, that I have always looked forward

to your marriage with our dear Elizabeth as the ties of our
domestic comfort . . . You were attached to each other from
your earliest infancy . . . you, perhaps, regard her as your sister,
without any wish that she may become your wife. (Shelley 1818,
103; italics mine)

Whether it be mother, sister, cousin, fiancée—there seems to be no varia-

tion among the Frankenstein women; they are all ethereal creatures whose
kindness and generosity could almost sicken. Agape refuses female differ-
ence; mothers are endlessly the same. The threat posed by the monster
then is also a potential path out of numbness to difference. What is clear
is that the integrity of the family unit depends upon a refusal to confuse
attachments, even while family roles remain fluid. Nothing about Victor
Frankenstein’s response to his father’s concerns suggests anything other than
securing a self-sufficient or self-contained unit: “My dear Father, re-assure
yourself, I love my cousin tenderly and sincerely. I never saw any woman
who also excited as Elizabeth does my warmest admiration and affection.
My future prospects are entirely bound up in expectation of our union”
(Shelley 1818, 104).
However aroused Frankenstein is by thoughts of an upcoming marriage
to a cousin/sister, libidinal energies also infuse the efforts of Frankenstein to
create his offspring sans woman, whose grotesque appearance repulses even
16 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

as it arouses and excites (“My heart palpitated . . .”; Shelley1818, 33). At

the same time, the homoerotic charges of Walton’s attentions to Frankenstein
imprint every word about the latter in his letters to his sister, who arguably
is an intermediary to redirect some of the erotic sentiments that Walton
has for Frankenstein. She keeps him from going too far with Frankenstein
by reminding him of domestic duties. Desire, it seems, can circulate about
as freely as the monster does through the symbolic. Attractions of all sorts,
ones that would be enabled by such wild circulation, are contained by read-
ing the matricide as a need to protect the family rather than an impetus to
seek its dissolution. Victor’s impending marriage to his cousin attempts to
secure endogamy, but the monster has always already invaded that family
circle; missing mothers attest to his presence.
Moreover, only marked as already diseased can Victor pursue with all
his energies and heart what was supposed to be the ideal male. The dream
grants him that license but only insofar as the pursuit is now plagued from
the start, or rather, the pursuit is the plague. Having created a monster whose
string of murders will extend to the heart of the patriarchal order allows
Victor to pursue an Other, who outwardly appears to be male, while all
along defending such an escape from the welcoming arms of the family by
insisting on the need to protect them from something he dare not name.
A reckless pursuit of an Other, whose homicidal tendencies are a result of
Frankenstein’s experiments and determination to break out from the ranks
(of family), allows the doctor to justify a preoccupation with the monster
and pursue him with all the passion a slave does his master. He has it both
ways; ideally, he gets to kill the family and still speak as its savior and
protector. Just as matricide both served as a call to close ranks around the
family and to explore territories previously foreclosed, Victor’s ambivalent
relationship to the monster (to the point of becoming the monster in the
dream) exposes the dual character of the monster. His repugnant appearance
deprives him of family, but as the embodiment and emblem of matricide,
he also gives expression to a nascent Oedipal impulse that infects the fam-
ily and seeks to dethrone the father. Agape is now monstrously other, eros.
Read as wish fulfillment, Victor’s dream not only renders the monster and
him indistinguishable, but it also ties thanatos to eros. However mightily he
claims to protect his family from the monster, his dream identifies the threat
to the family as a death drive that inhabits Victor and monster alike. And
the power of the dream is enough to suggest that the hideousness of the
monster derives equally from exposing these ugly secrets that underwrite the
family romance on the cusp of psychoanalysis’s birth. Nonetheless, reading
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 17

the dream according to the economies of the pleasure principle or simply

as wish fulfillment is not yet the only way to read dreams. By doing so we
will see how the text can be read to accommodate psychoanalysis’ patholo-
gization of sexuality as well as expose how the family unit is never discrete,
always infected from within by a monster of its own making.
The monster emblematizes the emerging threat to the traditional Swiss
family. And that threat expresses itself repeatedly in matricide, which in
turn structures and underwrites Mary Shelley’s and Frankenstein’s efforts.
This matricide, of course, is quite over-determined: (1) as an expression of
the imminent and inherent dangers to the family whereby the writing or
experience of writing autobiography requires the elimination of the mother,
and (2) as the intention to eliminate women from the (pro)creative process.
Mothers are not needed for monsters to be produced and possibly reproduce.
Breaking from the father leads Frankenstein to pursue interests linked to
the death or even repeated death of the mother(s). If the emerging science
of psychoanalysis proposes that the law of the father means to place the
mother out of reach, the novel obliges; but by exposing the ugly secrets
that underwrite the family romance, the novel also hands the father and the
author of the law over to the very same monster. As agape foundered on
the erotic tension that underwrites the family romance, the father succumbs,
or eventually succumbs to a law he comes to instantiate. In the beginning
the law is divided against itself.

The Ends of Family

The analysis above demonstrates how confused and upended symbolic systems
are as a result of the monster’s wild circulation through all linguistic orders
and topographies. Mothers and fathers, it could be said, are vying to be on
top. In trying to sort through all of this pre-Oedipal confusion, I want to
point out that at this moment in 1818 matricide is realized or actualized
as a textual event. But as Julia Kristeva has argued—and we will return to
her at the end of the chapter—matricide is incomplete or unrealized in the
nuclear family. In the meantime, we can assert that no mapping of Oedipal
desires in the text is all that readable without eliminating a narrative frame
or two. Any father/son conflict, which places the mother beyond the reach of
the son and motivates the latter to go where no man has ever gone before,
arouses feelings of an extraordinary sort in the wayward son as exempli-
fied here by Walton: “There is something at work in my soul, which I do
18 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

not understand” (Shelley 1818, 4). Understanding it, at least at this point,
requires reincorporating those passions into a more familiar one: “I have
found a man, who before his spirit had been broken by misery, I should
have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my heart” (Shelley
1818,10). Walton comes to see the friend he never had as a member of his
family’s heart, once the friend has become spiritless. That is to say, passions
matter less perhaps than timing. The lack inherent in the family structure
finds some sort of fulfillment in the remembrance of miseries that result
from having sought to push beyond the boundaries of the social order. But
pursuit of the secrets of nature fuel a secret passion or passions that under-
write the law of the father while simultaneously promoting a homosocial
structure (“Yet his manners are so conciliating and gentle that the sailors are
all interested in him . . .”; Shelley 11), that hardly lacks erotic overtones: “I
was easily led by the sympathy which he evinced to give utterance to the
burning ardour of my soul” (1818, Shelley 10). A self-destructive passion (“I
would sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every hope, to the furtherance
of my enterprise” [1818, Shelley 10]), borne of the family romance and
always already doomed to falter on its Promethean ambitions, feeds off of
its own belatedness or rear view that bonds male to male only once the new
friend lingers in misery. Two things are thus apparent: (1) the object choice
of at least the men is in flux; a division between cousin/sister/mother and
brother/friend/soul mate begins to emerge that links the latter with death,
destruction and unbridled narcissism, and (2) Male/male bonding has no
future; more than monstrous, at least one party to the relation, is always
already broken. But heterosexual unions fare no better. The fulfilled promise
of the monster to be with his creator on his wedding night disrupts the
most unambiguous scene of union, procreation and promise of a future.
Not just the possibility of producing new Frankensteins is undone, but the
fulfillment in generational transmission of values and beliefs is also disabled.
The family has no future.13
Mary Shelley’s response, as measured in the introduction of 1831,
aligns well with these notions that the novel is pulled toward a restitution
of institutions, a restoration of generational transmission in the wake of the
French Revolution. Simply put, inherent pressures in the novel push it to
speak on behalf of the family and other threatened institutions. “I am the
more willing to comply . . .” she asserts in the opening of the 1831 intro-
duction to the publisher’s and presumably the public’s wish to understand
how she came upon such a horrific idea (Shelley 1831, V). Of course, we
must be careful here. The exceptional duress that promoted such conciliations
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 19

does not indict the 1818 version so much as it indicates how in the interim
pressures to comply already reshape the text to harness those energies seek-
ing restoration of the family. After all, the poor woman was desperate for
money.14 As many have previously noted, Frankenstein’s culpability appears
beyond question in the 1818 text: he could have controlled his quest for
the “principle of life.” The 1831 edition, however, portrays Frankenstein as
incapable of free will, swept away by dreams inspired by the time. “Destiny
was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible
destruction” (Shelley 1831, 23).
What I have been suggesting all along is that pressures to comply—to
close ranks around the family, to resist passions that transgress traditional
boundaries—are already apparent from the start as a way to bring the
monster under control. Frankenstein’s dream, read as a testament to the
psychological mess driving creation of a sociopathic monster, confirms
internalization of guilt as a means to compartmentalize monstrosity. Such
guilt may not perfectly align with its future mapping in psychoanalysis, but
it is highly suggestive of Oedipal drives whose objects are yet to be codi-
fied by psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, such drives still indicate the potential
threat posed by men pursuing men. These kinds of men no longer feel at
home or have a place at home as Victor’s remarks upon returning to his
home indicate “I felt as if I were placed under a ban—as if I had no right
to claim their sympathies—as if never more might I enjoy companionship
with them” (Shelley 1818, 102).15
At this point, we might find it helpful to frame the nascent psycho-
analytic framework that emerges in the text with Paul Sherwin’s precise
observation that “the monster’s marginal place, neither inside or outside, is
thus the place of differences” (Sherwin 893). The text proleptically prescribes
the stakes and necessity of securing the margin by keeping the monster
fenced out—his presence felt, but not acknowledged. As the site of differ-
ence, the monster must come to define his difference or have it defined
for him so as to keep difference from differing from itself, to maintain
the possibility of securing identity, and to restrict the spectrum of possible
differences. And if Paul Sherwin avers, “for the psychoanalyst the creature’s
return amounts to “a bizarre [can I substitute “queer”] symptomatic return
of the repressed . . . a figure that re-doubles Frankenstein’s literal uncon-
scious complex, which is already present as an apriori with a determinate
constitution,” he also admits that the monster is not a psychic entity (yet),
but a real figure (Sherwin 893). That is to say, the repressed has not yet
returned as a psychic entity; interiority is not yet configured. Vedeer, for
20 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

example, can point to the feminization and loss of vitality in Frankenstein

as he pursues his passion, but the signs that link such desire with impo-
tency (an ineffectual pistol, a discarded oar; Shelley 1818, 95) only come
to be encoded as such during the next century. As Jane Brown’s remarkable
study of Goethe’s fashioning of a language for the emergence of repressed
passion or interiority, Frankenstein appears at a time when the road toward
pathologization has not yet been taken. The pressures of family, nation,
and empire all contribute toward the specific shape monstrosity comes to
assume, but only after psychoanalysis has established or created an interior
space to accommodate and monitor the monster.

Monstrous and Pitiful

To this point, I have offered no reason how the monster’s physical beauty
comes to seduce in the few examples presented at the beginning of this
chapter. No answer, of course, is forthcoming or could be. The many ver-
sions of Frankenstein that have appeared, even in the last years, attest to
the narrowness but highly suggestive strain of monstrous transformations
I consider. Still, the line from Shelley’s monsters to gods is helpful. The
seductive power of the monster testifies to the emergence of a death drive
that attaches to male same-sex desire. A sickness until death (something
that we will see already afflicts Werther) at the hands of a monster is the
fate that awaits the male homosexual. Or rather, the fetching monster is
infectious. Whatever directions, and there are many, that sexology pursued
in the nineteenth century, one result is to assign to the male homosexual a
desire that negates possibilities of a future. The threat posed by Frankenstein’s
monster to family, society, nation-building, and colonial conquest reconfigure
that creature as a figure of seduction, who like a Pied Piper calls out to the
queer to follow the monster out of respectable society into the clutches of
death. At the very least, the seduction of the monster allows for society to
separate the men from the “men.”
By highlighting one revealing shift in the monster’s attractive force, I
hope to set up the possibility for considering what possibilities were foreclosed
by a readings of Shelley’s text that attend only to pressures to re-secure the
family. Is there something about its push for family values that obscures
something other than a death wish, something that awakens a potentiality
beyond the margin, beyond the limits of desires? Godzilla, as we know,
was the inevitable expression of the atomic bomb and its uncontainable
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 21

destruction. Frankenstein, likewise, appears as an expression of the social

turmoil following, in particular, the French Revolution. But Frankenstein
holds out the possibility for befriending the monster, for a different politics
of friendship that among men that demands abdication of the father’s role
in securing a future for the family.
To adumbrate these possibilities, I call attention first to the effusive
display of self-pity by each of the figures triangulated in a world unfriendly
to erotic drives.16 Certainly, Frankenstein often appears more distraught over
his own misery than that which he has caused others. A few examples can
hardly exhaust just how often the doctor’s empathy ultimately is reserved
for himself:

Above the picture appeared a vast and dim scene of evil, and I
foresaw obscurely that I was destined to become the most wretched
of human beings. Alas! I prophesied truly, and failed only in
one single circumstance, that in all the misery I imagined and
dreaded, I did not conceive the hundreth part of the anguish I
was destined to endure. (Shelley 1818, 45)

I was guiltless, but I had indeed drawn down a horrible curse

upon my head, as mortal as that of crime. (Shelley 1818, 109)

I cannot pretend to describe what I then felt. Words cannot

convey an idea of the heart-sickening despair that I then endured.
(Shelley 1818, 51)

The monster, while certainly blameless for the hideous fate visited upon
him for simply looking hideous, proves equally adept at playing the victim
despite littering the field with victims of his own vengeance. “No one can
conceive the anguish which I suffered during the remainder of the night”
(Shelley 1818, 47), or “Must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all liv-
ing things?” (1818, 64), or “Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am
irrevocably excluded” (Shelley 1818, 64). Such self-pity comes, of course,
to justify his serial killings: “Can you wonder that such thoughts [of social
ostracism from “beautiful creatures] transported me with rage?” or . . . “the
murder I have committed because I am forever robbed of all that she could
me, she shall atone.” (Shelley 1818, 98, 98)
At times, the two seemed engaged in a game of who suffered most:
“Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter
22 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall
close them for ever” (Shelley 1818, 158). These final words of the monster
also demonstrate how such contests driven by self-pity eventually inspire
a death wish on the part of the monster: “I shall ascend my funeral pyre
triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames” (Shelley 1818,
158). His homicidal impulses, now directed inward, promise his absence,
his leaving the scene only to appear, of course, in different, more fetching
guises in the future or, as we shall see in the next chapter, hovering off
scene, marginalized or closeted in a space of interiority.
For readers of Rousseau, such self-incriminations and even self-indul-
gence are quite familiar. They speak to his battle for sovereignty over the
emotions, for cultivation of a self that masters through repression storms
of emotion. “Passion has always had to be controlled in European culture
[. . .]. Special in Rousseau is what is now called ‘repression,’ the character’s
insistent belief that they have conquered their passions when they really
haven’t” (J. Brown 19). And if, as in Frankenstein, trappings of the nuclear
family with all the joys of homeland form the basis for the law of the
father to control and channel passions, then the monster has already been
marked as a bearer of unnatural passions or desires from the start. That is
to say, Aristotle’s definition of a monster as an unnatural being bearing a
false resemblance to another creature (Huet 3–4) finds that what is added
to the mix or what from the outside adulterates the purity of the species
is an unnatural desire that comes, as in “Death in Venice” and, as we will
see, in The Sorrows of Young Werther, to seek its own extinction.
Let me back up for a moment. Self-recriminations begin to offer a pos-
sible space for interiority to take hold, a place to contain what is repressed.
The passages to follow indicate that territorializing the monster by confining
him to an interior space already begins to anticipate the characteristics that
will come to cleave to the homosexual after such an interior space is fully
completed or adumbrated by psychoanalysis. We have already noted above
some similar passages that point to how the ambiguity of certain state-
ments can be settled, once they begin to refer to the modern homosexual.
Likewise, the sickness of the other male or, as Vedeer argues, the eventual
sapping of vital life energies that results from Eros or its related pursuits
may find confirmation in Victor’s comatose state upon being rescued by
Walton and his crew, but Victor’s new-found companion—outside the
bounds of English society—finds enough rejuvenation in that new bond
to become alert, voluble, and more or less account for almost all of the
novel’s material. Confiding to his new mate, Walton, Dr. Frankenstein is
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 23

revived through storytelling, sharing his deepest secrets to another man.

Another way to understand the distinctions I am trying to make is to
recall how Vedeer’s psychoanalytic reading understands male/male bonding
to be absolutely destructive, the energies released by Eros disable any pos-
sibility of domestic tranquility, which, he claims, is Mary’s aim. But when
we remember how the writing of the novel itself is a hideous or monstrous
progeny that overlays or at least confuses any clear sighting of the monster,
then Vedeer’s reading demonstrates how psychoanalysis comes to view the
monster as a debilitating influence that makes of male scientists a slave and
that needs to be exiled or territorialized. (“You are my creator, but I am
your master,—obey!”; Shelley 1818, 116). The emergence of an interiority
allows for compartmentalization. Such a retrospective reading of the exchange
below reveals how the scrambled or unreadable energies of the text come to
mirror the fate of the homosexual, once the nuclear family with the father
at its head is (re)configured.
Frankenstein does away with mothers, and the monster can only be
what he is by emblematizing the matricide that underwrites the emerging
social order. How the opening up of a space of interiority, of an unconscious
receptacle of repressed energies, anticipates descriptions of the homosexual
is quite legible in the following two passages: “Everywhere I see bliss, from
which I alone am irrevocably excluded” (The creature on the ills of being a
“fallen angel” rather than the doctor’s “Adam”; Shelley1818, 64). To which his
creator replies, “I will not hear you. There can be no community between you
and me” (Shelley 1818, 64.) The first quote recalls the introduction and D.
A. Miller’s understanding of a Stonewall generation who never fancied social
acceptance and whose pleasure was linked to such destitution, a destitution
whose dreams of a mate were unrealizable. In fact, the creature’s difference
is so fundamental that he comes to recognize himself as “not even of the
same nature of man,” however noble his intentions might have been (Shelley
1818, 79). Echoes of an unnatural desire linked to the pleasures of resent-
ment threaten to become and do become sociopathic and fatal for the family.
Irrevocably excluded, fallen from grace into the reaches of the damned,
and a threat to the established roots of family if for no other reason than
central to his creation is matricide, the monster begins to acquire charac-
teristics that anticipate later depictions of the homosexual as the Godzilla
of family values. His partner, the doctor, of course, has no problem under-
standing how the threat of engaging with self-creation extends beyond the
horrors of that creation to his own relations and passions: “I must absent
myself from all I love . . . and put an end to my slavery forever” (Shelley
24 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

1818, 104). Just how unfit for citizenship the homosexual will become, if
we recall Bersani, is already embedded in the nativist sentiments expressed
by Frankenstein as he returns home upon news of poor William’s death:
“My country, my beloved country! Who but a native can tell the delight
I took in again beholding thy streams, thy mountains, and, more than all,
thy lovely lake” (Shelley 1818, 45). And nature’s poetry, Clerval, may offer
a domesticated alternative to the wild pursuits of the erotically charged mad
scientist, but such an alternative involves rape of another sort: “[Clerval’s]
design was to visit India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of its
various languages, and in the views he had taken of its society, the means of
materially assisting the progress of European colonization and trade” (Shelley
1818, 108; as reported by Frankenstein). The convergence of values and
interests is clear (family, nation, colonies, and god) which, in turn, renders
the monster a threat to the integrity and continuation of the family. But
the new assemblage of these interests is well on its way to sequestering
that threat in the depths of the unconscious. And any expression of those
monstrous or repressed desires makes of that person a bearer of something
unnatural who is unfit for human society and who saps vital life energies
from those that person encounters.
Another way to see the convergence of such energies to produce a
pathologized sexual other is to consider the Christian medieval understand-
ing of a monster as a visual sign of a warning from God. Combine that
with Aristotle’s definition of a monster as an unnatural being bearing a
false resemblance to another creature, and one can see how little tweak-
ing is needed to append that unnaturalness to a sexual other once sexol-
ogy begins to dominate the scientific discourse of the nineteenth century.
AIDS as a punishment from God for unnatural practices among queers
is the predictable outcome of such logic. Even Diderot contributes to the
thinking that calls for extinguishing carriers of the unnatural: “What is a
monster? A being whose duration is incompatible with the existing order”
(Huet 89). Little is needed to see how that which is incompatible with the
existing order threatens that order by its very existence; in other words, it
is a disease that needs to be killed.

The Godzilla of Family Values

In conclusion, I would like to recast the nascent psychoanalytic model that

has emerged as a philosophical one, namely to conceive of the monster’s
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 25

creation in terms of Fichte’s “Tathandlung.” It is important to recall that

the unconscious at this time is a null, an emptiness rather than a reposi-
tory for repressed desires.17 What Fichte’s idealist philosophy does is: (1)
explain how the self becomes its own creation or simply posits itself, and
(2) prepare a space of interiority for the self that shirks back at beholding
itself as other. Given that psychoanalysis has not yet sanctioned an interior
space to repress unnatural desires, Fichte’s philosophy, it seems to me, is
nicely poised between inside and outside, negotiating a margin that has yet
to take shape. Most important is Fichte’s idealist philosophy that begins with
a simple demonstration of identity, A = A; that is to say, immune to any
sort of variable, this statement of identity insists upon the primacy of the
identity between subject and object for any kind of consciousness to emerge.
Before any object can present itself to consciousness, there must always
already have been an originary act of self-positing, or “Tathandlung,” in
which the limits of the self, of self-positing are established. This preconscious
activity is what allows the self to become conscious of objects that appear
outside of itself, for no other reason than the self cannot have itself as an
object of consciousness. Without taking up the discussion of freedom that
emerges from this initial act of self-positing, it is easy to see how mediation
that links or re-links the object to its origin in the subject delays the act of
self-recognition, renders in that interval the self in its posited being differ-
ent, distorted as if in a mirror, or just other. The self appears monstrously
other to itself. What attributes come to obtain after such monstrosity is
contained or tamed are united by a desire for endogamy, a retreat from
threatening otherness. And as we have also noted, the emerging figure of
the homosexual poses significant risk, embracing that otherness instead of
retreating to some perch to police the margins. But if heteronormativity
comes to rely on an argument for reuniting different sexes or some version
of happiness or coming together as opposites, the Fichtean model provides
a means to question that assertion. Instead of retreating to an interior space
to reclaim the self ’s priority, the self, given to seeking out itself in the oth-
erness that it is, can embrace such abjection, such obliteration in the face
of a non-sublatable otherness.
Walton’s expedition mimics a Fichtean exercise of the self-reaching its
own self-imposed limit and turning back. Walton comes to discover that he
will not be the first to reach the North Pole, the monster will already have
been there by the time he arrives. The North Pole is no longer unconscious,
by which I really mean undiscovered. Heeding the pleas of his crew, Wal-
ton turns back. He comes to a limit of an already discovered frontier that
26 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

horrifies and terrifies rather than exalts. There is nothing to cross; human-
kind has already been there and done that. His retreat, although clothed in
the jargon of compassion and a reawakened empathy for crew, mirrors the
circular course traveled by the self in confronting an Otherness that is the
self in exile. Just as the self seeks restoration of family and roots, Walton
opts to do the same. Exploration turns out not to be his thing.
Frankenstein signals a move toward securing the home front from
such otherness. That allows for the recognition of a trajectory—only one
among many, for sure—that gives the monster an air of irresistibility, an
embodiment of that which is on its way to being repressed, to giving the
unconscious content. Simply stated, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the
self in search of itself. More important, the self-recriminations, the effusive
displays of self-pity require a positing of the self, along Fichetean terms, given
how the self requires another self to pity or criminalize. Self-pity becomes
disgust with oneself that, as Cohn averred with the shift of the narrator’s
judgment of Aschenbach, becomes societal disgust of the queer on the prowl
for youngsters or, in the case of Gods and Monsters, of the creator of the
cinematic Frankenstein, looking to corrupt the few good men that remain.
Frankenstein’s self-pity finds a correlative in the self-abnegation that plagues
the tightfisted Aschenbach. The Fichetan self, rendered abject by confronta-
tion with the self in its otherness, comes to despise itself to the point that
it invites the repudiation of a society hell bent on driving that loathsome
being to off itself. Almost. Foucault’s repressive hypothesis would have us
recognize that the causal chain is reversed; the self ’s insistence on protect-
ing its selfhood, preserving its borders, and keeping its lakes, mountains
and skies pure is what drives these two twentieth-century Frankensteins,
Aschenbach and Whale, to go over the edge.
The central argument of this book is that another potentiality remains
untapped, unrealized, unacknowledged with the initial act of self-positing.
To go over the edge is also to escape the trappings of the family and home-
land, to become, at least in part, invisible and beyond the reach of the
panopticon. Frankenstein’s creatures are beings who signal to their creators
to pursue an eccentric course, to go over the edge. Stated otherwise, what
if the self were to allow for itself to become fragmented, disoriented, and
un-reconstructable in the face of otherness? In coming up against its own
self-imposed limits (“Anstoß”), the self succumbs and embraces its state of
abjection: “I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and
stead of what will be ‘me’ ” (Kristeva, 6). The mention of horror and abjection
throughout this chapter calls forth the work of Kristeva, for a pre-symbolic
 A Man’s Best Friend Is His Monster 27

language not dependent upon an unrealized matricide and submission to

paternal law, whereas in Frankenstein, the matricide is completed.18 The
following sentence from the opening pages of Powers of Horror finds apt
repercussions in Frankenstein: “Out of the daze that has petrified him before
the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that has cut
off his impulses from their objects, out of such daze he causes . . . fear”
(Kristeva 6). Easily deciphered here is a profile of the monster, cut off from
the absent body of the mother and arousing fear. But no two selves, as the
ceaseless framing of the novel suggests, are entirely distinguishable. The
imperative to embrace one’s abjectness thus easily transfers to the doctor.
“Repudiate the name of the Father” (Kristeva 7, trans. altered). At that
point, homecomings are impossible, but for Kristeva a different, messianic
possibility emerges: “Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through the
death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms the death drive into a
start of life, a new significance” (Kristeva 15).
The remainder of this book is given to tracing that transformation,
to identifying textual moments that bring into being “monsters” that testify
to a return of the shattered self, remnants of a self that have always already
been shattered, often rendered mute like a marionette or already dead before
its time like the AIDS patient. What Kristeva says of this resurrection in
terms of Aristotelian catharsis is particularly instructive: The shattering oth-
erness returns (in the form of the chorus) in sound and rhythm, “trace[s],
and concatenation[s]” (29). “Aristotle seems to say that there is a discourse
of sex and that is not the discourse of knowledge—it is the only possible
catharsis [Recall the Quilt project]. That discourse is audible, and through
the speech that it mimics it repeats on another register what [knowledge]
does not say” (29); that is, what has not yet not been said but still repeats,
and mimics. Rethought under the terms proposed by Fichte, Frankenstein
should see in his monster the possibility of a new best friend, pieced together
from fragments of the dead in the laboratory and a literal reconfiguration
and reanimation of the return of the other(s) as an invitation to hear a
different call, a different drummer. The following chapters will attempt to
find articulations of those echoes.
 2

Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story

or the Genesis of a Queer Jewish Outlaw

The opening episode in Jiri Weil’s Mendelssohn is on the Roof recounts

the peculiar fate of Jewish-German identity that had riddled Germany’s
own troubled concept of itself as a “Volk” since the Enlightenment. Julius
Schlesinger, a municipal officer and a candidate for the SS, sends two Czech
workmen onto the roof to perform a task that Schlesinger’s own fear of
heights prevents him from doing. The roof, despite its elegant and imposing
panoply of statues of German composers, is scarred by a single form, that of
the Jew Moses Mendelssohn. Schlesinger, eager—given the suspicions raised
by his name—to prove his Aryan origins, orders the workmen to remove the
statue. Unversed in the fundamentals of German music and racial science,
the workmen have no way to determine which among the many statues
represents Mendelssohn. Schlesinger, who has just completed a course on
racial science called “World View” and studied a series of slides illustrating
the “Jewish difference,” instructs the workmen simply to find the statue
with the biggest nose and remove it. After a quick survey of noses and
their lengths, the workmen put their noose around the neck of the statue
with the oddest nose and begin pulling at the rope. Suddenly, the order to
desist is given. The statue, as it turns out, was not of Felix Mendelssohn
but rather of Richard Wagner.
Of course, the task posed a more difficult challenge than the mere
sizing up of noses would indicate. Since 1812 Felix Mendelssohn’s parents,
Abraham and Lea, had used the name Bartholdy, and with their baptisms
in 1822 the name became official. Like his siblings, Felix was raised with

29
30 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

no religious education until 1816 when he became baptized at age seven

in a Reform Christian Church. Informing his brother of the name change,
Abraham, son of Germany’s most famous and celebrated Haskalah Jew
Moses, made no attempt to hide his complete withdrawal from the fold:
“There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jew-
ish Confucius.”1 Neither name nor nose would any longer suffice to isolate
the Jewish interloper.
As the above episode suggests, traditional markers of Jewish identity
and difference had become increasingly unreliable or irrelevant as Jews, eman-
cipated from the ghetto, in the nineteenth century began to participate in
the social and cultural life of Germany. Although the events in Weil’s work
occur at a time when efforts to resecure Jewish difference were accompanied
by an unprecedented genocidal campaign, the compulsion to reaffirm the
otherness of the Jew surfaced, as we shall see, with the first stirrings of
emancipation.2 In the case of Felix Mendelssohn the most indelible if not
visible sign of Jewish difference was also missing. His parents emphatically
refused to have Felix circumcised.
Nowhere more effectively is the effort to reinscribe Jewish difference
encoded than in Adalbert Charmisso’s “Peter Schlemihl and His Wondrous
Story.” Schlemihl’s lack of substance (i.e., lack of a shadow) produces a set
of behaviors and responses that give rise to a new way of defining the Jew
as outsider. Schlemihl’s story charts the new manner in which the so-called
“moral deficiency” of the Jews will come to be expressed in the emerging
civil society of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century.3 The
observation that Schlemihl is a Jew comes so late in the text precisely because
the text gives rise and sets in play a new constellation of characteristics to
marshal against the Jew. Moreover, the process by which the Jew or schlemiel
seeks to restore his identity or shadow gives rise to a form of narcissistic and/
or homoerotic desire. That is to say, the Jew who found that actions intended
to advance assimilation serve only to re-anchor his ethnicity according to a
set of revisionist terms also finds that his responses to that redefinition of his
character redirect his social urges. The Jew who would be German is aberrant,
and, if we read with Foucault, this means that due to the desire produced
by such efforts to assimilate, s/he is essentially or essentialized as other.4
In the previous chapter the monster emerged as a threat to the
social order. Saving that order—or at least preserving the possibility that
the monster could be restrained—was enabled by the easy recognition of
that threat. Monsters are insufferably ugly. In this chapter, the threat to
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 31

German society is posed by one who can pose all too easily as a German.
That is to say, as Jews began to attempt to assimilate and adopt the dress
and customs of Germans, the monster from within becomes difficult to
distinguish from “real” Germans. For a people in search of a (national)
identity, identifying the enemy is, if we recall Carl Schmitt, the essence of
the political. As such, a new means to mark the Jew as inalterably other
requires a different assemblage or a recasting of social relations to link the
Jew with a new kind of otherness—as a sexual invert. No longer does the
Jew’s religion, which s/he can cast off as out-of-date, provide the nascent
body politic with its necessary enemy, but rather something potentially more
insidious and pathological demands his diseased body be excised from the
body politic. There is no conversion therapy for sexual inversion. What this
chapter sets out to do is offer a reading of Peter Schlemihl that demonstrates
how Jewishness and male same-sex desire converge to produce a Jew that
could never truly pass as a German.
As an attempt to offer one possible genesis of homosexuality, I hope to
demonstrate how the logic of inversion, or the convergence of two kinds of
difference, enables the production of a vocabulary or sign system to encode
and register the emergence of the modern homosexual. The consequences
and possibilities of that sign system are taken up in the next chapter. While
the Jewish question is foregrounded—Schlemihl is after all a Jew before he
becomes a homosexual avant la lettre—an equally important task of this chapter
is to understand how the apparatus of sexuality begins its deployment, how
assemblages of power reconfigure to produce a new kind of outlaw, securely
circumscribed, albeit in the dark, within the scope of the panopticon. Part
of that deployment is to construct an interior space—in this instance a
closet—that keeps the new emerging monster contained or territorialized. At
the same time—and this also explains the choice of Schlemihl—the monster
is produced or called forth by the very apparatus that seeks to marginalize
and silence it.5 In terms of the overall theoretical argument, the disappearance
of the protagonist at the end of the novella suggests the possibility that this
newly born, queer Jewish outlaw exceeds the reach of the West’s emerging
biopolitical enterprise. Exploring how this fugitive spirit comes to inhabit and
unsettle terrain far removed from his apparent temporary abode in the Orient
will be the subject of the final chapters of this book. In the meantime, let
us recall Puar’s analysis of the current geopolitical map that casts the Arab
as the sexual deviant or outlaw, a formation whose initial disseminations can
be espied in part by Chamisso’s text.
32 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

Shadows and Reflections

Any attempt to capture the confusion inaugurated by the potential divide

between inside and outside finds ample evidence, of course, in the works
of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Before discussing the particular junction between
Jew and queer in Schlemihl, I want to explore the difficulties posed for
narration by interiority in Hoffmann. I do so to emphasize the challenges
presented by interiority and how it could be said to call forth psychoanalysis
to navigate its minefield. Chamisso’s text will then be read to expose pres-
sures of a different but related sort unacknowledged by Freud: the need to
re-ghettoize the Jew.6 Hoffmann’s work captures the need to align interior
experiences with an external world through some kind of logic that allows,
so to speak, the eyes to be a reliable window to the soul. The Sandman’s
obsession with eyes and his removal of them from his apparent victims lit-
eralize the attempt to look inside, to expose the black hole where repressed
desire is beginning to seek refuge. The eyes also offer confirmation, should
they reveal an interior force that animates them, that the owner of such
eyes is in fact a real living being and not an automaton.
The struggle to find a language other than the elusive one offered by
limpid eyes occupies, as we know, the opening sections of The Sandman.
The narrator, in fact, absent at the start save for presenting three letters, two
from Nathaniel to his friend Lothar (the narrator) and one from his beloved
Clara. Afterward, the narrator explains his dereliction of duty in allowing the
letters to begin his tale by insisting that traditional openings of narratives
were unable to carry the weight of this new task: capturing the interior life
of the protagonist. “No words came to me capable in the least of reflecting
the color and luster of that internal image” (Hoffman 131; all translations
mine). How could the narrator proceed? For one, disentangling Nathaniel’s
inner experience from his own is nearly impossible. “All that was marvelous
and odd about his story filled my soul.” Such an admission of transference
or a wish for such suggests that what one ascribes to Nathaniel is first medi-
ated by the narrator as he tries to mediate the feelings aroused by Nathaniel’s
experience. Nathaniel’s first letter falls into the hands of Clara, who dismisses
Nathaniel’s fears by insisting that the Sandman is a figment of his imagination.
That aside, the wayward trail of the letter, falling into the hands of one who
denies the reality of the Sandman, indicates how fraught with ambiguity and
a lack of clarity such translations of feelings and emotions become.
It does not take long, of course, for psychoanalysis to rearrange the
disjointed parts of the text and offer readings that come to be organized
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 33

around a primal scene. As we know, Freud is in a position of sufficient

posteriority to propose as primal the scene in which Nathaniel partially
observes from behind a curtain his father and Coppelius huddled around
a hearth. That is, Freud’s interpretation is psychoanalysis’s own experience
of “Nachträglichkeit,” the coming-to-mean something of events or dreams
that seem initially too polyvalent to permit meaning to attach to them. If
one examines the language of the scene in question, a certain vocabulary
does present itself that aligns neatly with possible psychosexual content.
“My father opened the door of what I thought was a cupboard. But what
I saw was no cupboard, but rather a black cavity with all sorts of strange
instruments lying around. Oh my God! As my father stooped down to the
fire, he looked completely different. Some horrid convulsive pain seemed
to distort his mild, honest features into a repulsive and ugly image of the
devil. He looked like Coppelius, whom I saw brandishing red hot tongs”
(Hoffmann 122–23). For Freud, whose concern is focused on the source
of the uncanny or Nathaniel’s experiences of repetition as both familiar
and unfamiliar, Nathaniel’s unease stems from repressed desires and fear.
Specifically, it is the fear of the Sandman stealing his eyes that leads Freud
to the following observation: “the fear of going blind is often enough a
substitute for the dread of being castrated” (Freud, SE XVIII 338). Primal
scenes, constructed as they are after the fact and through no small measure
of projection or transference by the analyst, are always only enabled by a
supplement or a non-coincidence of what appears to be the same. In this
instance, the scene is narrated by the patient as reconstructed by Freud
years later.7 The dream takes place in many places and many times, yet it
is such tergiversations on the part of Nathaniel in telling this particular
aspect of his story that convinces Freud of its significance. But even if we
grant Freud license to regard this as the primal scene which he then links to
fears of castration, that does not eliminate the potential for other readings,
other mappings of desire. Melanie Klein, for example, associates the fear
not with castration but rather with death.8 Above all, the text already points
to homosexuality as a logic to contain differences on all of these levels. As
Hélène Cixous points out, what the text tries to repress but cannot is its
homosexuality. Freud only mentions Olympia in a footnote, and further
declares that Nathaniel was incapable of copulating with a woman in that
same aside (Cixous 537–38). Indeed, not much is required to suggest
that the scene describes anal intercourse between two men; the father
bending over in pain as he is mounted by Coppelius brandishing red-hot
tongs.
34 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

The text never says that, and nor does Freud. But if he is seeking to
repress the text’s movements in that direction, as Hélène Cixous argues, he
does nothing of the sort in the third of his Three Case Studies of Sexuality,
namely the case of the Wolfman or Sergei Pankejoff, a Russian aristocrat
who also displayed traits of an anal retentive personality, including the need
for enemas. Freud bases his diagnosis on a dream the patient had as a child
in which several white wolves are sitting on a big walnut tree with ears
“pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something” (Freud, Three Case
Studies 213). The patient awoke with fear, which in turn signals for Freud
that underwriting the dream is a traumatic event: the child witnessing one
afternoon, at the age of one-and-a-half, his parents having anal intercourse.
In this instance, there is no effort to repress homosexuality. “It was
only when, during the analytic treatment, it became possible to liberate his
shackled homosexuality that this state of affairs showed any improvement”
(Freud, Three Case Histories 260). By freeing “each piece of the homosexual
libido” the patient sought out some means to express such pieces of his lib-
erated self to benefit the common good” (Freud, Three Case Histories 260).
What difference in the two stories allows for the dots to be connected, for
anal eroticism and homoerotic expression to come out in this text, whereas
the Sandman repressed it? More than the mere failure of the Sandman to
accomplish such repression is the pulling back of the curtain that obscured
Nathaniel’s vision of the primal scene. The Wolfman, likewise, reports that
he felt “hidden from the world by a veil” that only tore after an enema had
allowed him to evacuate his bowel (Freud, Three Case Studies 264). When
that veil is removed, when Freud pushes back the curtain, the deferred
meanings of these primal scenes become readable, offering a pathology of
homosexuality. As Deleuze and Guattari in Anti Oedipus remind us, the
Wolfman in particular reveals Freud’s selective logic.9 The evidence speaks
for itself. Hiding behind a veil or ripping that veil could just as easily cir-
culate metonymically in a heterosexual economy of desire, namely breaking
the hymen of a virgin. More to the point is just how many possible primal
scenes Hoffmann’s “Sandman” offers: the vivid account of the Sandman that
issues from the mouth of the governess, the visit of the apparent double of
Coppelius that triggers Nathaniel’s mental breakdown, or all of the scenes
that include an encounter with Olympia. Once a light is filtered through the
apparatus of sexuality (as evinced in this instance by Freud), a primal scene
is illuminated that comes to allow for construction and pathologization of
desire according to the anal erotics suggested by the scene at the hearth and
realized by the Wolfman in his crib. As for the Wolfman, he disputed Freud’s
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 35

claim that he had been cured and spent nearly six decades in therapy. Shortly
after completing his stint with Freud, the Wolfman developed a delusion; he
would walk the streets holding a mirror in front of his face to observe what
he insisted was a hole that had been drilled into his nose.10
As we recall, Frankenstein’s monster never possessed a mirror image
and circulated wildly through the symbolic order. Given that Peter Schlemihl
loses his shadow, one might predict a related fate for him, namely an inability
to cast and behold any mirror image as well as a shadow. In the one story
of Hoffmann’s that the shadowless Schlemihl does appear, “The Adventures
of New Year’s Eve” (“Die Abenteuer der Silverster-Nacht”), he has a reflec-
tion, (Spiegelbild). The apparent protagonist of the story, Erasmus Strikl,
is the unfortunate soul who loses his reflection. The distinctions drawn by
Hoffmann, most prominently the one between shadow and reflection, merely
underscore what the editor of the opening frame identifies as the Traveling
Enthusiast’s problem: an inability to distinguish between the inner and outer
world: “The Traveling Enthusiast distinguishes his inner and outer lives so
minimally that no one can distinguish between the two” (Hoffmann 181).
That deficiency is evinced in the Traveling Enthusiast’s own framed story
of how Strikl comes to lose his reflection to a supernatural temptress who
has procured the image for the devil Dappertutto. At story’s end, (except
for a postscript by the Traveling Enthusiast), Erasmus and Schlemihl meet
and attempt to recuperate what each has lost: Erasmus will cast a shadow
that Schlemihl will reflect: “He came upon a certain Peter Schlemihl who
had sold his ‘Schlagschatten.’ ” Both men wanted to forge a companionship
(eine Kompagnie gehen) so that Erasums Spikher would cast the necessary
“Schlagschatten” and Peter Schlemihl would in turn reflect the appropriate
mirror image (“Spiegelbild”; Hoffmann 114). The curiosities of the passage
are numerous and working through them will help us recognize a messianic
potential intimated but hardly explored in Chamisso’s text. I will return to
that potential at the end of the chapter.
At this point, one has to ask what is a Schlagschatten, a term that
appears but once in Chamisso’s text during the protagonist’s attempt to have
a painter restore his shadow. Since the term is a painterly one, the artist can
be expected to know the difference. Also, what enables a shadowless person
to cast a mirror image? What kind of recuperation can be expected from this
odd mixing of reflection and shadow? Schlagschatten can be understood only
in relation to the term Eigenschatten; the former, which Schlemihl has sold,
is the shadow cast by one person or object onto another, a way of throwing
oneself or one’s image out onto the world. The latter refers to that which is
36 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

blocked from the source of illumination, such as the dark side of the moon.
That is to say, Schlemihl, who will come to be a social outcast, may still
possess the kind of shadow that results from turning away from the world,
from retreating to a closet or a place of interiority. Such self-possession
evidently allows for him to have a mirror image, the bounty of being self-
reflective. The devil in this Faustian reprise of sorts is Dappertutto. As his
name implies, he is everywhere and nowhere (überall und nirgends), or, as
the word also signals, exposed on all sides. Like Frankenstein’s creature, he
traverses distances quite effortlessly, but his lack of a mirror image is not
the result of scientific experiment. He has no aspect to project or reflect.
Erasmus’s subsequent loss of his reflection to Dappertutto, his loss of the
ability to self-reflect as Schlemihl can, occurs during the time which this
married father is in pursuit of the temptress Giulietta. The mirror image
seems to be tied to a moral or ethical faculty dependent on self-reflection,
whereby self-reflection requires one to turn at least one aspect or side of
oneself away from the light.
In a story about misalignment between inside and outside, such attempts
to develop any kind of logic or symmetry are doomed. The comments that
frame the story indicate a need to contain and establish an order to the non-
synchronous and asymmetrical aspects of the actual narrative of the Traveling
Enthusiast. The editor seeks to become the perspective or unifying aspect
that can bring all the misaligned pieces into some kind of order only to be
unmasked and called out by name in the Enthusiast’s postscript: “What do
you see in that mirror: Is it really me? Or Giulietta . . . Heaven’s image—
infernal image . . . You see, my dear Theodor Amadäus Hoffmann . . .”
(Hoffmann 114). The awkwardness of the proposed restored specularity
of the two figures, indicated by the odd punctuation, structure, and the
possible shift in the antecedent of the pronoun “you,” is rendered wholly
impossible once the Traveling Enthusiast and Hoffman are asked to gaze into
the mirror that was not intended to reflect them. Or was it? At the very
least, there is an infinite regress as the self turns to its own reflection and
through a series of subsequent reflections (or frames) seeks to recover the
lost image of a whole self. As we shall see, the failure of such an effort also
restores foreclosed possibilities for the self to escape its own bad reflection.
For now, we can recognize how Schlemihl and Strikl’s attempt to form
a collective body complete with shadow and mirror image defies all logic.
How can Schlemihl cast a mirror image that corresponds to the shadow
thrown from a different body? To see oneself in the shadow of another or
the reflection of another may correspond to the editor’s attempt to suture
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 37

all the misaligned elements, but the experiment can hardly succeed unless
someone’s body is cut and spliced to conform to that of the other in the
transaction. The last line of the Traveling Enthusiast’s framed story is thus
wholly expected: “Nothing came of it.” (es wurde nichts daraus). His post-
script or supplement at the end of this misbegotten experiment testifies to
the fecklessness of the recuperative effort, to the effort to restore specularity.
In fact, the frames of the story reflect an inability to secure inside from
outside, real from imaginary. In the fourth and final section of the story
(which is more than a section given the inclusion of the postscript) the
Traveling Enthusiast indicates that he is going to tell the story of Erasmus
Spikher, based on what the latter left behind but in Spikher’s own words.
All of this is framed by the editor’s remarks at the beginning of the tale.
The text is mediated through so many voices or layers that the odd
remarks appended by the Traveling Enthusiast only point to all the loose
ends that disable aligning inside/outside, and this extends to the persons
themselves. When the Enthusiast specifically addresses Hoffmann in the
postscript, it only confirms that any reliable perspective on the events of
the text falters on its various, misaligned planes or frames of narration so
much so that the mention of Peter Schlemihl at the end of part four gives
no indication of his appearance earlier in the story. He is introduced anew.
Without a Schlagschatten he left no traces of his earlier appearance. As we
now work through Chamisso’s text and recognize how pressures to solve
the Jewish question inform ones about sexuality, a different fate other than
the one described by the editor may await both figures. That is, the ability
to erase traces of oneself may have its advantages.

Aryan Panic

Peter Schlemihl’s name may signal his Jewish origins, but, oddly enough,
it is not until the end of the novella when he has taken to the road in
his seven-mile boots that any such reference is made. In fact, it is a stun-
ning loss of orientation that betrays his oriental roots. Racing from “east
to west and west to east” (63) with an ease shared perhaps only by Fran-
kenstein’s creature, he is overtaken by a fever and loses his senses. Upon
regaining consciousness, he finds himself in a hospital bearing his name,
“Schlemihlium.” But it is not his name (he is known only by a number)
that designates not his Jewishness but rather his physical appearance. “My
name is Number Zero, and because of my long beard I now qualify as a
38 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

Jew, which entitles me to be treated no less carefully” (64). For the first
time in the light of day since pawning his shadow, Schlemihl is afforded
equal rights in his one-time adopted land. Two conditions are fulfilled to
allow for such a homecoming: an abandonment of any attempt to disguise
his Jewish appearance and a promise, at least implicitly upheld by his recent
past and his seven-mile boots, to keep wandering and thus relinquish any
claims of a “German-Jewish” homeland. Jewish money, particularly since it
is no longer controlled by Schlemihl but by his one-time servant Bendel, is
welcome even if the Jew is only conditionally so. “Schlemihlium” is named
after its exiled benefactor. Jewish money, however questionable its source, is
essential for the improvement or healing of German society. The foundation
could not exist without it.
The curious ambivalence toward Schlemihl and his money is apparent
throughout the text, most notably when his riches and extravagance allow
him to be mistaken for and celebrated as a count, only to be loathed once
the source and cost of his riches are discovered. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century the Jew in German society undoubtedly confronted a
similar ambivalence. His connection to German society was in no small
measure an economic one. “Jews and non-Jews lived in two worlds apart,
with economic relations forming virtually the only link between them”
(Rürup 5–6). By 1820 even the salons, once the locus of interaction between
Jews and non-Jews, had been supplanted by houses of titled bureaucracy
and the upper middle class (Arendt 82).11 In an emerging new economy,
the Jew had become the essential financier, and in some respects, these so-
called “Münzjuden,” those conversant in matters of money, were welcome
and prominent. For example, the Director of Industry for Berlin in 1807
listed thirty Jewish bankers and only twenty-two Christian ones, and the
naturalization registers of Jews for 1809 noted fifty-three bankers, fifteen
money changers, and sixteen financial agents. Many of these financiers
had come from places outside Berlin, which may have contributed to an
uneasiness about their presence (Toury 162). The ambivalence that Schlemihl
confronts reflects an entrenched distrust of Jewish business transactions
and, more important, of Jewish ethics. Noteworthy is how that distrust
is formulated to respond to the influence that Jews began to exercise in
German societies. In 1783 Friedrich Traugott Hartmann proclaimed in
open debate that the Jew, whether destitute or wealthy, was spiritually and
morally a group apart (Hartmann 94−95). Adolf Franz Friedrich Ludwig,
Freiherr von Knigge, asserted that the Jew was never inhibited by ethics;
gain was his sole concern (Knigge 151–52). Baron Schroettter, serving in
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 39

the Prussian cabinet, claimed that the greatest capital sums were already in
the hands of Jews, who were prepared to resort to any means to attain their
objective (Freund 177). The ensuing fear of the German’s fate at the hands
of moneyed Jews was framed most stridently by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich
Grattenauer in his 1803 tract, Wider die Juden. Ein Wort der Warnung an
alle unsere christliche Mitbürger (Against the Jews: A Word of Warning to our
fellow Christian Citizens). Grattenauer viewed Jewish emancipation as a
“threat to Germans’ ability to distance themselves from Jews” and came to
what for him was an inevitable recognition of the unalterably and morally
inferior character or the Jews. As he writes in that same tract, “Grant the
Jews full rights of citizenship [. . .], they will reward you royally for you
will stand and tend the flock of Jews; your sons and daughters will become
the slave and handmaidens of the Jews; you will work in the sweat of your
brow, but the chosen people of God will enjoy the fruits and live grandly!!!”
(as cited, Katz 101).
Peter Schlemihl’s history embodies those fears, or more specifically,
those fears that arise from the Jews’ attempt to assimilate. His arrival at the
outset of the novella from other shores indicates his nomadic nature. Upon
touching land, he attempts to establish himself in the new country by seek-
ing out Thomas John, the man to whom Schlemihl’s brother has written
a letter of reference on behalf of the new arrival (Chamisso 58). Adequate
preparation for presenting himself to his new benefactor requires an extreme
makeover: “I opened up my bundle of belongings, took out a new black
coat, washed, and dressed in my very best clothes. Then, with my letter of
introduction in my pocket, I set out on my way to the man, who I hoped
would further my modest ambitions” (Chamisso 18). The desire to acquire
riches soon replaces his modest hopes, given the grandeur of Thomas John’s
lifestyle and the ease with which such comforts and luxuries are obtained.
Thomas John, whose rather generic name obscures the bearer’s origins, has
established himself in society by buying his way into a station for which his
name indicates that he hardly has standing. In his circle, money substitutes
for character: “A man worth less than a million is, pardon the expression, a
wretch” (Hoffmann 18), and thus betrays his real reason for disembarking
in Northern Germany. John’s sentiment has nothing to do with a reserve of
feeling for the land and its people; such sentiment is rather indiscriminately
exchanged as is a name or money.
Of course, his name, when reversed as John Thomas, is then British
slang for penis. The inversion of his name suggests already a homoerotic
inclination, and were the city in Northern Germany identified explicitly as
40 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

Berlin, one might venture that the letter of reference was tied perhaps to
Schlemihl’s suitability for the societies of “warm brothers” that had been
formed recently. If nothing else, Thomas John’s name also implies ignorance
of what is front and what is back or what is first and what is second. The
moneyed Jew is thus tangentially or provisionally at this stage linked to a
secret society, not of the Elders of Zion (It is too early for that!?) but rather
of those whose true secret societies are only revealed when names (almost
like one does in Hebrew) are read right to left or inverted.
The chatter of Thomas John’s circle indicates just how inverted and
questionable the values of the newly moneyed are: “One spoke in earnest
of frivolous matters and frivolously of earnest ones” (Chamisso 19). For
these parvenus, whose “joking and bantering” constitutes an affront to the
values of real society, nothing is truly earned. The spoils of their riches,
the signs that they are not “wretches” but rather the “master of millions,”
is brought about by sorcery (Chamisso 19). Whatever is required for the
comfort and entertainment of this coterie—a telescope, a carpet, a tent—is
all produced miraculously from the meager pocket of a nondescript man in
a gray suit. These folks, who are to initiate Schlemihl into his new world,
produce nothing; their riches are fabricated. Money brings them the fix-
ings of nobility—names, titles, and property—but they have no intrinsic
worth and can be made to disappear as magically as they were brought
forth. That, in fact, is the fate of Thomas John, when he eventually finds
himself in debt after having been swindled through some shady real estate
dealings by the figure simply known as Rascal. Money has effected a sever-
ing of the name from the land, and the transactions that have enabled this
severance are impure ones.
Worth remarking is Schlemihl’s effort to distinguish himself from
“wretches,” as noted above. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the creature was a
wretch whose contagion, indicated by the remarkable number of polyoptons,
threatened to become a cancer capable of infecting the entire body politic.
In this instance, “wretch” has already attached to one whose “immutable
Jewish character”—to recall critics of Jewish emancipation—poses a threat
greater perhaps than Frankenstein’s; he can find a means to hide what for
the monster was his hideous appearance. But if the doctor feared creating
a bride for the monster might result in a race of such creatures, Schlemihl’s
mentor, Thomas John, relieves such fear. An inverted penis is unlikely to
breed, and no doubt depictions of such an inversion easily accommodated
ideas of the circumcised Jew as feminized. Stated in broader terms, the
conjunction of femininity and Jewishness asserted by the self-hating Jew
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 41

Otto Weiniger in his 1903 work, Sex and Character, is already taking shape
in the German and German-Jewish imaginary.12

Self-Evacuation or Panoptic Confusion

While it is the lack of a shadow that signals the suspicious origins of

Schlemihl’s wealth and marks him as an outsider or a non-German, the
manner in which his questionable wealth or alien status is affirmed exposes
a damning deficiency that no Enlightenment program for emancipation
can heal or overcome. Programs promoting the state to recognize the equal
status of the Jew as proposed by W. von Humbodlt or those promoting
Bildung as a mean to free the Jews from “his moral degradation” serve only
as a means to reaffirm Jewish deficiencies along a different axis (Dohm I,
75, 76).13 In the end, the progressive Humboldt serves the regressive aims
of C. Dohm. For both, Jewish difference is tolerable only insofar as it can
be eliminated. Ironically, it is Schlemihl’s lack of a shadow that is a sign of
ineradicable difference. To be without a shadow is to be totally penetrable.
Schlemihl is thus without substance which, in turn, grounds his identity as
Jewish. If one links a shadow to that which is with substance or is solid,
then Schlemihl is without character because his wealth or that which would
allow for admittance into society lacks, like the fortunes of the Jewish
financiers, the substance or solidity of established money.14 If selling his
shadow allows Schlemihl apparent entry into society, it also reveals that he is
without substance by virtue of his apparent ability to blend in or assimilate.
The Jew might seek, through any means possible, to enter German society,
but his entry would always be marred by an indelible character deficiency,
whose ineradicable persistence would manifest itself in the very attempt to
gain entry into German society. In this respect, the selling of the shadow
points to something far more troubling for any Jew seeking to assimilate. It
is not just an indication of the Jew’s irrepressible urge to engage in trade,
but it is also a sign of the Jew’s absolute absence of character; his charac-
ter is that he has no character. Trading in religious traditions of millennia
for the comforts and conveniences of the present reveals the Jews’ lack of
substance: “Assimilation did not, as its advocates had hoped, dispose of the
Jewish question in Germany; rather, it shifted the locus of the question and
rendered it all the more acute [. . .], [Germans] began to chalk up against
the Jews an all-too-great faculty for abandoning their ethnic consciousness”
(Scholem, Jews 77).
42 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

The shift in the locus of the Jewish question, whereby the Jew’s non-
identity becomes the basis of fear, is linked to several factors displayed by
Chamisso’s text. The most important would be the political conservatism of
German-speaking lands that followed the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The
increasing urgency to ground German identity in the myth of the “Volk”
necessitated a re-securing of the signs of that identity.15 How Schlemihl
comes to secure his fortune and thus his non-identity threatens those forms
of identity that require fixed signs. Schlemihl’s ability to tender his shadow,
to reduce substance to a set of exchangeable signs and commodities, raises
the fear that all signs of identity will run amok. Identities will become
unreadable and unreliable, and most disconcertingly for those whose identity
is linked to the “Volk” and its soil, “Germanness” might be traded fraudu-
lently. After all, Schlemihl is mistaken for a king and a count. Restoration
or maintenance of the old order is thereby thwarted. That is precisely the
significance of the remonstrations of his fiancée’s father, the land and tree-
loving forester, when he confronts Schlemihl about his shadowlessness. The
father’s vocation, for sure, requires lots of time spent in the shade and its
shadows, which now renders him privy to the truth of the charlatan. “Is a
certain Peter Schlemihl really unknown to you?” (Chamisso 40). His first
words assert the need for names to mean something, a clear if somewhat
tangential reference to what for Germans was so inscrutable and unreliable
about Jewish practices of naming. The denial of who one is—after all, a
name cannot just be a name—must be addressed. Schlemihl, however, is
really no name; it merely signifies one who is without substance or who
for the sake of assimilation was too eager to pawn his essence: “And if
I am that same man?” Schlemihl responds to the question posed by the
forester, who responds vehemently, “[W]ho . . . came to lose his shadow!!”
(Chamisso 40). The forester’s moral indignation emanates at least in part
from the inability to name the other or for the other to allow himself to
be named. He can only be known by what he last lost.
For Germans, seeking to ground an identity through constructions
of the “Volk,” each proper name must be the property of someone. That
explains why in certain German duchies the conditions for becoming a
“naturalized” German included the adoption of a hereditary family name
(W. Mosse 73). It also clarifies the significance of the Schlemihl Founda-
tion. His convalescence, since he is a patient in his own hospital, is linked
to reclamation of his name, which means as well that he must regrow his
beard and allow himself to be recognized as a Jew. Since Schlemihl is not
really a proper family name but rather something closer to an epithet,
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 43

this reclamation is tantamount to the Jew’s admission that his presence in

Germany is improper.
Owning up to one’s name can only mean for Schlemihl the disown-
ing of any homeland. Chamisso’s Schlemihl does bear numerous similarities
with Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.16 The lack of a shadow is thus the
equivalent of a lack of a homeland, a metonymy apparently employed by
many of Chamisso’s contemporaries.17 Given that the question of residence
had long been an obstacle to Jewish integration (Rürup 16), Schlemihl’s
decision to sell his shadow was not his own. Shadowed by traditions that
set him apart, Schlemihl tenders the marker of those differences as a
condition of residency that, as a result of the ensuing lack, constitutes a
revocation of those rights of residency. The polyvalent significance of the
shadow (e.g., as a marker of substance, of tradition, of a soul, of a home-
land, or ever the right of residency) all coalesce and serve as a figuration of
the misfortune of the Jew caught in a double bind: to meet the ostensible
conditions for residency is to betray one’s unfitness for it. What one might
call Schlemihl’s moral awakening is thus tied to his renunciation of that
right, and not as some have argued, to his severing of ties with the man
in the gray suit or the devil.18
Schlemihl’s absence, in fact, structures the text. The story begins with
a preface consisting of three letters: one from Chamisso to his publisher
Hitzig, one from Hitzig to Fouquè, and one from Fouquè to Hitzig. The
letters explain the publication history of the text and how Chamisso comes
to possess it. Schlemihl, wearing his seven-mile boots, a black Kurtak, and a
long gray beard, had turned up at Chamisso’s door and then had given the
manuscript to him. Publication is thus dependent on Schlemihl’s departure,
and he embraces his role as an alien to the point of dressing as one. That
is the moral directive that issues from his personal confession. Throughout
the text Schlemihl repeatedly remarks that what has brought him to be what
he is today, a Jew embracing his alien existence, is a product of strict moral
reflection: “I have imposed several strict sentences on myself ” (Chamisso
49). And the severest sentence that he passes upon himself is, despite its
consequence, one that liberates the heart: “I sat there without a shadow or
money, but a tremendous weight had been lifted. I was cheerful” (Chamisso
57). A clear Jewish conscience can be achieved only by foreswearing a
homeland and the money illegitimately acquired in residence there. A Jew
who once pursued integration into civil society learns the importance of
confession, which returns him to himself, an eager wanderer groomed once
again to be a Jewish alien, but now, at least, a shadowless one.
44 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

Degeneration

If this dialectic charts moral ascendancy according to regressive characteristics,

it also crosses with another metonymic chain. The schlemiel who substitutes
for the Jew without a shadow will also substitute for one who is sexually
degenerative and nonreproductive. As we shall see, the second chain produces
a dialectic of its own. On the one hand, it serves to remark the Jew as “other”
along an axis of sexual degeneracy. For even if Schlemihl exposed the moral
degeneracy of the “assimilated” Jew by forfeiting millennia of tradition, he
also exposed the unreliability of traditional markers of Jewish difference.
Sexual errancy might thus prove to be both more reliable and damning.
The text does not assert that such errancy is inherent in the character of the
Jew. Rather, the closeted existence that the Jew is forced to live as a result
of being without substance redirects his desire. His introversion surfaces as
sexual inversion. Inversion, as Gerd Hekma points out, is a familiar trope
for homosexuality in the nineteenth century (Hekma 213–40). Sexual devi-
ancy thus serves to differentiate the introverted Jew from outsiders. He is a
different kind of different, which will not be fully formulated until the end
of the century and the birth of psychiatry. On the other hand, Schlemihl’s
history also revivifies the very Enlightenment ideals that threatened the
integrity and purity of the “Volk” and necessitated the ostracism of the Jew
for the sake of that concept. In other words, what one might call a dialectic
of Enlightenment is the return of Enlightenment taxonomies that serve to
reclassify the Jew along the very lines that the Restoration sought to annul.
Ironically, what calls for the discarded taxonomies of the Enlightenment
is the inability of the Restoration to account for or name Schlemihl’s particular
type of deviancy. If his misfortune or “lucklessness” can be attributed to the
avarice of a Jew seeking admittance to civil society, his moral deficiency is
also evident in a nascent sexual orientation. Schlemihl’s deviant desires are
clearly not in the foreground during his early adventures; they result from
the life he is forced to live as a result of his shadowlessness. As one who
would be a good German citizen, so to speak, Schlemihl seeks to adhere
to the “positive injunction” beginning around 1800 for “all citizens to be
(hetero)sexually active and to marry”(Hull 409–11).Guaranteeing the new-
found privacy of the family means that the state has to protect the integrity
of the family unit (Hull 411). While punishment of errant sexual practices
is eased and sometimes eliminated with the emergence of civil society, the
need to foster the family as a procreative unit gives new rise to new forms
of deviance that come later in the nineteenth century to congeal around a
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 45

specific type of deviant (Foucault vol. 1, 44–45). Just as the otherness of

the Jew serves to lend obverse meaning to the mythical entity of the “Volk,”
civil society protects the family by producing the sexual deviant, who, for
the sake of that society, needs to be criminalized and marginalized. Protect-
ing the integrity of the family generates its threat; that allows for it to be
policed and thus protected from the enemy, to once again recall Schmitt.
This disdain, in turn, is the expression of the moral authority required,
paradoxically, for the protection of civil society. “I will not accept anything
from someone who does not have a shadow,” the servant Rascal exclaims
as he “turns his back to Schlemihl” (Chamisso 40). This renunciation of
Schlemihl allows Rascal, in turn, to marry Schlemihl’s fiancée and thus enter
civil society, however questionable Rascal’s own ethics might be. While the
manner in which the shadowless Jew and the sexually criminal are linked
still needs to be worked out, its logic could be summarized as follows:
According to Hull, “only those unfortunates deemed incapable of participat-
ing in civil society remain[ed] sexually non self-determining: the celibate
and those stigmatized as either criminally or sexually ‘subordinate”’ (Hull
409). Chamisso’s text legitimates that stigmatization. It is Peter Schlemihl’s
unfitness for civil society, however, that generates perverse desire. Instead
of being sexually self-determining, he is forced to seek himself; his desire
emanates from a lack of substance or selfhood without which he is unfit for
civil society. That, in turn, renders him sexually criminal. As we shall see,
the emergence of same-sex desire in Schlemihl is structured as a narrative,
a process that constructs its own pathology. That pathology is the invariable
consequence of the mannerisms effected by the Jew seeking assimilation.

Bad Company

The schlemiel is no stranger to sexual errancy. While Chamisso and Heine,

for example, cite different origins of the term, both link the schlemiel to
illicit sexual activity. Chamisso cites the Talmud as his source (Chamisso
770). The schlemiel is one who had sex with a rabbi’s wife, was caught, and
then killed. Heine’s schlemiel has a different origin. In “Princess Sabbath,”
part of the Hebräische Melodien, Heine refers to the Biblical figure Schlemiel
ben Urzy Schadday, who is accidentally killed when Pinchas seeks to slay
the nobleman Simri, who is having sexual relations with a woman of the
Caananites (Heine 3/1, 123–72). Heine’s version, often contested, is none-
theless instructive.19 As witness to a forbidden sexual act, he is killed; guilt,
46 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

or at least the stigma that accrues to the name schlemiel, is transferred onto
one who is more or less an innocent bystander. Heine’s long discussion of
the schlemiel in that same work seeks to demonstrate the false appropria-
tion of the term by “Christianized Jews” (Gilman Self-Hatred 182). Heine’s
questionable exposition of the term’s etymology highlights how the schlemiel’s
act is less significant than the transferability of the stigma associated with
the act. A Jew who merely witnesses illicit sexual relations is subject to the
same misfortunes as if he had engaged in such relations. As we shall see, a
component of Schlemihl’s deviancy is a similar kind of impotence; he can
only watch hopelessly as his former fiancée is wooed by Rascal.
Although it will be decades before the term “homosexuality” has
currency, recognition of homosexuality as “a primary sexual deviancy” and
the homosexual’s segregation as a “special subclass” was already taking
hold in the early nineteenth century (Gilman, Degeneraton 159). In fact,
the 1790 Briefe über die Gallantereien von Berlin auf einer Reise von einem
österreichischen Offizier documents the supposedly new types of friendship
that are developing among men (Tobin, Warm Brothers 15). The letters are
significant not only because they speak of cults of “warm brothers” but also
because they give public expression to the opprobrium directed at such acts.
For example, the author of the letters, assumed to be John Friedel, writes,
“It was impossible to watch the spectacle for very long. The thought alone
aroused feelings of horror (“Grauen”)—and the actual sight—wouldn’t
you have the same reaction?” (as cited Tobin, Warm Brothers 145). As the
citation suggests, anti-Enlightenment sentiments have begun to crystallize
around an incipient homophobia. While the punishments for illicit sexual
behaviors may have been eased if not eliminated with the introduction of
the Napoleonic code (Steakley 173), a critical component of determining
what should be forbidden was the sentiment of the public; civil outrage
could mandate severer punishments for sex between two men (Lautmann
172–75). Important to note is that the vocabulary of illicit sexual rela-
tions is changing as the state’s role in policing the family in civil society is
being redefined. The public’s outrage, which is directed against the Jews,
for example, in the Hep-Hep riot of 1819, is also summoned to define
the limits of sodomy, which, not coincidentally, is being redefined as sex
between men (Hutter 189–91).
The Jew and the man desirous of other men are joined through public
sentiments of outrage. The schlemiel has a new set of behaviors to which
he can conform and thus fulfill the promise of his name. That, moreover,
explains Chamisso’s description of Peter Schlemihl as ungeschickt, a descrip-
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 47

tion shared by the painter whom Schlemihl asks to restore his shadow:
“Through what clumsiness (Ungeschicklichkeit) does one come to lose
his ‘Schlagschatten’?” (Chamisso 14–15). Ungeschickt is how the author of
Lucinde described himself and may refer to same-sex relations among men
in the vernacular of the day as well (Helfer 176–77). Peter Schlemihl’s social
clumsiness now assumes a sexual character.
Peter Schlemihl’s sexual errancy, however, is not just the result of asso-
ciations linked to the term schlemiel; it is explicitly worked out in the text as
well. The wonderful history generated when Schlemihl tenders his shadow for
forged or queer coin is precisely one that at least since the Renaissance had
linked counterfeiting (or usury), heresy, and sodomy (Bredbeck 5). Although
Schlemihl initially has designs on women, his lust for riches immediately
awakens a curious desire. He describes his first encounter with the man in
the gray suit as follows: “I trembled with fear as I looked blankly (stier). I
felt like a bird hypnotized by a snake” (Chamisso 21). The masculine image
of the first clause (stier) is quickly sexualized in the next. “The man in the
gray coat himself seemed to be very embarrassed” (verlegen: Chamisso 21).
The man is both embarrassed and mislaid (verlegt) or soon to be mislaid.
The latter sense of the word is apparent only later, when Schlemihl leaps
upon the man from behind, who by dint of a bird’s nest had become
invisible. Schlemihl is a bird seeking his nest in another man’s behind, one
who had enchanted him like a snake. Sex with animals, of course, has long
been one of the behaviors associated with sodomy, but sex with or among
animals is now suggestive of sex between two men. The ensuing confusion
of who is the pursuer and who is the pursued (Schlemihl or the man in
the gray suit, the bird seeking its next prey or the snake entrancing the
bird) anticipates the confusion surrounding which role the male sodomite
assumes. It signals a sexual inversion much like the inversion of values that
characterizes Thomas John’s coterie.
This newly awakened desire assumes more definite contours through
the reactions it elicits and the dream that is produced in response to those
reactions. As one without a shadow, Schlemihl is fully penetrable, thereby
suggesting an overt feminization. It is thus no surprise that he is greeted with
disdain by the first boy he sees: “With much hilarity he betrayed me . . . to
the whole group of street lads, who began to curse and throw shit (Kot) at
me (Chamisso 24). The incipient sodomite, whose murky secrets (düstres
Geheimnis) is betrayed by a suspicious boy, is the target of shit (Chamisso
26). The continued derision and disdain that Schlemihl sustains from
men and boys that same day overcomes him to the point that he finally
48 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

surrenders his manhood and falls asleep atop his coin: “At night I found
myself lying atop my coin, at which point sleep overwhelmed [overmanned]
me” (übermannte; Chamisso 24). The dream produced by sleeping upon
his queer coin is telling. He dreams of Chamisso, briefly surveys the books
on Chamisso’s study, and then returns his gaze to Chamisso, who is not
breathing and is dead (25). Schlemihl, “overmanned” by sleep, thus dreams
of a cadaver. Desire for dead bodies and magic are thus part of the psyche
of the penetrable man, elements of the dream landscape of one who is now
occupied with how to re-stick it, e.g., his shadow, to himself.
Schlemihl’s affections are for himself or for the author of his self,
Chamisso. Stated otherwise, the public humiliation that ensues from sell-
ing his shadow or pawning his Jewish heritage forces him to mimic the
desire of the man in the gray suit, who upon propositioning Schlemihl for
his shadow remarked: “I only request that you allow me here and now to
stick the shadow on me, how I do that is my concern” (Chamisso 22).
Mimicking the desire of his antagonist, seeking to re-stick to himself that
part of himself that has been traded away, is thus a form of self-affection.
And that affection is related to dreaming one’s author, since, from a liter-
ary perspective, that is what Chamisso is. Seeking or dreaming oneself in
the form of another may posit a self to be the object of desire, but that
desire is related to being entranced by a dead self as other. Desire for one-
self in the form of another, in the form of another man (and a shadow is
nothing but a form) is now linked to necromancy. The historically linked
practices of sodomy, usury, heresy (or being a Jew who sells his shadow),
and sex with the dead and animals are all subsumed under and as forms of
self-affection. It should also be pointed out that the other books upon the
desk in Chamisso’s dream are by Haller, von Humboldt, and Linnæus. The
Enlightenment is thus implicated in this reclassification of shady or aberrant
desires. Anti-Enlightenment or anti-Napoleonic sentiments are projected onto
the Jew, who sells his shadow in the hope of gaining entry to civil society
but who thereby is given to sexual errancy, the many forms of which are
expressed by male-male same-sex desire as a form of self-affection.
If we regard narcissism as a form of self-affection, the text prolepti-
cally recalls Freud’s early text on homosexuality, “On Narcissism.” In that
essay Freud specifically linked narcissism with homosexuality. The narcissism
expressed by homosexuals, according to Freud, was the same as the primary
form in which a child cathects itself as whole with a parent without differ-
entiation. Homosexual narcissism occurs at a later stage, when the subject’s
original narcissism confront the “admonition of others,” which is likewise
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 49

accompanied by the awakening of critical judgment. That is, the subject’s

primary attachment to itself is shattered by the criticism of others and is
later reformulated or recuperated in new ego ideals. The subject thus seeks
an ideal completion of himself in another male (Freud, SE vol. 14, 88–94)
and comes to recognize what he himself would like to be, such as a Jew
becoming a German.
Although any reading of Schlehmihl through the lens of psychoanalysis
and a language specific to homosexuality is anachronistic, Freud’s text does
help illuminate, by its very different but similar pathology, the genesis of
same-sex desire in Schlemihl. The key difference is that what is provision-
ally termed Schlemihl’s self-affection is engendered by the specific climate
of Jew-hatred that surrounds his attempt to assimilate. It is, after all, the
need to jettison religious tradition, figured in the trading of one’s shadow,
that forces Schlemihl to confront the “admonition” or ridicule of others. As
a result of that ridicule, Schlemihl closets himself, “As long as the sun was
shining, I locked myself inside with Bendel. And it was said that the count
has retired to his cabinet” (35). If his actions are shady, it is because he is
forced to operate and live in the shadows. The desires bred by a closeted
existence might not be directed initially towards an object of the same sex,
but this predicament is what renders him impotent to pursue or consum-
mate any interest in women. He is unable to leap across the so-called gulf
(die Kluft überspringen, 32) that separates him from Minna when they first
meet. And it is what prevents him, in contradistinction from Minna, from
truly loving, “She truly loves” (36). The inability to love truly the woman
whom he would make his wife is what he finally admits is the curse that
has fallen upon him. (“A curse stood upon me,” 37). In fact, he lacks any
language to describe what he has become: “[A]nd do you know it, this curse,
do you know who your love is—what he—?” (Chamisso 35).
While he may not yet be possessed by a love that dare not speak its
name, the blanks in his confession indicate that what he is or what he has
become cannot be named. He is the homosexual before the homosexual has
been named (Halperin, 100 Years, 15–40). This same linguistic gap informs
his response to Rascal, when the servant accuses him of being shadowless:
“But Rascal, dear Rascal, who led you to think such an unfortunate thing,
how can you think—?” (Chamisso 39–40). He who has sold his shadow
has become the unspeakable; it has brought one to the idea of something
heretofore unqualified by language. If this is the case, it is important to note
the sequence of events. The selling of his shadow for the sake of assimila-
tion engenders in Schlemihl a self-affection. Ridicule and disdain transform
50 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

that affection into a desire to seek himself (his shadow) under the cover of
night. That, in turn, forces him to spend much of his time working in his
cabinet, locked up with Bendel. Finally, such an existence compels him to
forgo the affections of women or to be disdained as something unspeakable.
In such fashion the text offers a genesis of forbidden desire.
If to become a German Schlemihl needed to shed his Jewish substance,
which, nonetheless, betrayed the Jew as too substance-less to be German,
then the ensuing pursuit to recapture his shadow or the tendered portion of
his self can only be described as a queer pursuit or one that turns back on
itself and follows a tortuous path. As Schlemihl remarks, “He who frivolously
set foot off the straight (gerade) path will suddenly be led astray down a
different path that pushes further and further astray” (Chamisso 49). That,
he adds, is his curse. The recognition of his aberrant course follows the
description of the event that most dramatically marks his desire as aberrant
as well, namely, his pursuit of the man rendered invisible by a bird’s nest.
The scene begins with Schlemihl sobbing to find relief from a “name-
less” weight upon his heart (44). Although he has no name for what ails
him, he drinks furiously (mit grimmiger Durst; Chamisso 45) the poison
that the unknown had poured into his wounds. On the one hand, the
animal urges, suggested in this instance by his thirst and devouring of wild
fruits, hint at a sodomite’s proclivity, but only insofar as the subject is also
becoming feminized. The first signs of that feminization are his weeping
and his wound(s). On the other hand, the effects of that poison awaken
in him a mighty urge (ein mächtiger Trieb; 45) to leap upon the invisible
man. Since only the man’s shadow is visible, he seeks to make himself the
master of that shadow: “O shadow, I thought, do you seek your master. I
will be him” (Chamisso 45).
His queer path is also marked by gender confusion or a mixing of
feminine and masculine traits. This poison arouses in his partially feminized
self the desire to become master of another man’s shadow or substance. To
become such a master he must chase or stalk that which reveals itself to
be another man only when Schlemihl has jumped the shadow and threat-
ened to take him. “Like the lion in pursuit of his prey, I shot forth with a
powerful leap in order to take possession of it” [the shadow, the man, the
prey?] (Chamisso 46). Having traded away his shadow, the aggressivity and
desires associated with being a “Herr” are no longer aroused by women;
he leaves the women in his life since he cannot “really love.” Rather such
desires are now summoned by the chase and the urge to be the master over
a masculine shape: “A terror pulsed through my heart, enflamed my desire,
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 51

gave wings to my flight [. . .]. I got closer and closer to the shadow. I had
to reach him.” The apparent success of the chase is rewarded with a bash-
ing: “I then received the worst blows to the ribs that any person has ever
experienced” (Chamisso 46). The affect of his ostracism and self-recrimination
is horror, the affect of which is to give his desire an object. That object,
which simultaneously repulses him, turns out to be the man in the gray
suit whose “Tarnkappe” is drawn over both of their heads and at whose feet
his shadow and Schlemihl’s peacefully rest side by side (Chamisso 47). “The
effect of that shock made me struggle desperately to hold down my oppo-
nent. I plunged forward and fell to the ground; beneath me, on his back,
was a man whom I held firmly but was no longer invisible” (Chamisso 46).
The man’s “satanic smile” also defines Schlemihl’s predicament in
which he can only watch impotently as his former servant Rascal woos his
former fiancée. (And here we might recall Heine’s etymology of the term
schlemiel.) Of course, the civil society to which Schlemihl sought admittance
has yet to define his condition. As such, he swoons or exits consciousness
(Chamisso 50). When he comes to, his “despised companion” (verhaßter
Begleiter) curses him: “Isn’t that just how an old hag would behave! Get
up and act like a man. Finish the business you started. Or perhaps you
have second thoughts and want to continue whimpering?” (Chamisso 50).
A pathetic old woman, one who cannot complete what she has resolved to
do, is the phrase that this text attaches to a man whose absolute penetrabil-
ity sends him in pursuit of another man. And while his irresolution may
signal feminization, that indecision also opens, as we will see, by its very
undecidability, onto a utopian horizon.

The Exception Queer or the Emergence of the Sexual Outlaw

In the chapter “Jewess and Schlemihl” from Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt
describes the impossible predicament of the “exception Jew,” the one who
“struggles against the fact of having been born a Jew” and comes in the
end to struggle against oneself:

For the possibilities of being different from what one is are

infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no
longer any particular choices. There is only one aim: always, at
any given moment, to be different from what one is; never to
assert oneself; but with infinite pliancy to become anything else,
52 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

so long as it is not oneself. It requires an inhuman alertness not

to betray oneself, to conceal everything and yet have no definite
secret to cling to. (57)

Peter Schlemihl is this exception Jew as well. Having jettisoned his tradi-
tion in the vain attempt to win acceptance, he has forfeited all choice. His
infinite resources or recourse to magic offers him an infinite pliancy but
only to acquire identities that mask his own lack of one. He must conceal
his lack of a shadow, but the secret that he clings to is without any precise
or definite meaning. “In the end it was only a shadow, nothing more than
a shadow” (Chamisso 41). The maintenance of that secret and the “inhu-
man alertness” required so as not to betray that secret, however vague the
significance of a shadow might be, makes Schlemihl well-nigh a criminal:
“Late in the evening I threw a coat on and sneaked out of the house like
a criminal” (Chamisso 40). When he approaches his fiancée’s family after
learning that his secret has been exposed, he presents himself “as a criminal
before the judges” (40). Civil society has lured the Jew with the promise of
citizenship only to criminalize him. His secret, despite attempts to closet
himself in his cabinet with a servant, has always only been an open one.
The exception Jew, however, also has exceptional possibilities. Once
the ideal he has set for himself becomes unrealizable, this non-sublatable
difference between what he is and what he would like to be gives rise to a
critical faculty or judgment (Urteil). Just as Arendt argues that Varnhagen
accepted her pariah status in the face of recrudescent Jew-hatred (Arendt xii),
Schlemihl, armed with a new-found faculty for critical judgment, decides to
retain his soul rather than trade it in for his shadow—thus precluding any
possibility of assimilating. “I looked upon myself as a new character who
had to be dressed for the world; my suit was a very modest one” (Chamisso
58). He looks upon himself without denying who he is. His self-affection,
necessitated by loss, leads to a division of self that generates a critical judg-
ment, the result of which is an appreciation or even apprehension of a soul.
The dissonance between his shadowless self and his shadow fosters a new
axis of difference, and the living out of this difference between what the
Jew would like to be and what he is becomes the embodiment of that soul.
He is the wanderer: “I got up and began wandering” (Chamisso 58). The
unbridgeable division that rends the exception Jew renders it impossible for
him to take up residence: he is always elsewhere. The Jew who would be
rid of his past for the sake of becoming German is a divided one, given
in his self-affection to male-male, same-sex desire. He is thus criminalized,
 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story 53

and the ethical judgment that issues from recognizing the true nature of his
soul is self-ostracism. The difference that inhabits his soul produces the text,
which is nothing less than Schlemihl’s self-assessment addressed to Chamisso.
The text is then the document of a Jew coming to ethics, via this newly
awakened critical faculty and same-sex desire, so as to abandon Germany.
If by joining two metonymic chains the text fulfills a wish to remark
the Jew so as to exile him, it also resurrects the very terms that threatened
civil society with integration of the Jew under equal terms. As stated above,
civil society sought to police the family. Difference or acceptable difference
was constructed along an axis of gender. For psychoanalysis, gender is the
phenomenology of difference (Warner 200). Schlemihl or the difference
that is Schlemihl undermines that phenomenology, and that necessitates
his exile. But such difference is productive. Schlemihl becomes a scholar,
demonstrating that ineluctable variation is constituent of all existence.
Roaming from the arctic Iceland to tropical Africa—with an ease equaled
only by Frankenstein’s monster—he charts the geographies of inner Africa
and the lands around the North Pole, noting the effects of the magnetic
fields as well. He writes Historia stirpim planatarum utriusuq orbis, a system
for mapping the natural systems of plants that increases its known types
by at least one-third (Chamisso 66), and plans before his death to leave
the completed manuscript to the University of Berlin. He draws upon the
botanical sciences of the Enlightenment, something already anticipated by his
dream through references to works by Linnæus and Humboldt. Difference
is thus marked by genus and species, in which related organisms, in line
with Lennæus’s binominal classification according to genus and species, are
capable of interbreeding. In other words, difference is not marked by race
and gender. Hot/cold, north/south, flora/fauna, genus/species, and the vast
category of things in-between remap the conditions of understanding and
identity. Chamisso may seek to trivialize Schelmihl’s scientific writings by
rendering them socially irrelevant and hopelessly incomplete: “And so it was,
that already from the beginning everything I would gather and put together
was doomed to remain a fragment” (Chamisso 61–62), but their fragmen-
tary character ensures the endlessness of the pursuit. The Enlightenment
categories that Schlemihl reintroduces are thus inexhaustible ones that also
serve to destabilize the phenomenology of difference that sought to stabilize
a Jewless civil society around gender and sexuality. The very conditions of
exclusion designed to free society of the Jew engender endless possibilities
for the Jew’s (re)entry into that society via the Enlightenment and its forms
of taxonomy. Ironically, the terror that such possibilities of uncontainable
54 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

difference evoke is proleptically signaled by Schlemihl’s occasional residence:

a cave, not in Afghanistan but nonetheless in the desert of Thebias or in
the Middle East, guarded by a poodle.
If we return for a moment to the enigmatic transaction between
Erasmus Spikher and Peter Schlemihl as presented in Hoffmann’s tale, the
outcome is perhaps not as feckless as the narrator leads us to believe. As
noted previously, the effort to restore specularity through a joining of one
man’s Schlagschatten to another’s reflection is destined to fail. Not just the
outlines of each would hardly reside seamlessly atop or beside each other,
but also the snipping away or suturing required to make the shape or
shapes fit their new bearers would result in a self or selves hardly recogniz-
able to that self itself. So, when the narrator of this frame of a multiply
framed tale remarks, “es wurde nichts daraus,” “nothing” is just as likely a
displaced substantive that frustrates tracking. That is to say, what came of
this experiment is something pushed beyond the boundaries of recognition
or policing, an entity that registers as a nothing, escaping the narrator’s
judgment and purview.
The possibility of a new-found freedom on the other side of narrative
consciousness is perhaps best formulated in a different genre about the same
Peter Schlemil, i.e., the Volksgedicht: “In der Tat, Schlemihl hat seinen
Schatten verkauft, dabei seine Seele verlor’n/Danach hat man niemals mehr
von ihm gehört, und niemand weiß mehr, daß er einst gebor’n”20 (“In fact,
Schlemihl sold his sad and thereby lost his soul. Thereafter no one ever heard
of him again, and no one no longer knows that he was even born”). In other
words, the space of interiority necessary for any self-reflection is evacuated;
it becomes a nothing that loses sight of its subject as if that captive being,
once captivated by his own reflection and interiority, never existed. We will
now turn to exploring the messianic potential of this de-territorialized self.21
 3

Queer Prosthetics or Male Tribadism

in Kleist’s “On the Puppet Theater”

Given the almost impossible array of interpretations “Über das Marionetten-

theater” (On the Puppet Theater; 1812) has succeeded in entertaining, it is
nothing less than expected that it should be asked to respond to questions of
sexuality.1 If a text can put into play so many signifieds, it is only because
its performative character is so seductive or enchanting that the text comes
to be enamored of itself, sufficiently flattered by all suitors to welcome their
numerous advances. The text is personified to the extent that the virtuoso
performances of the interlocutors are foregrounded as much as the argu-
ment itself. Nothing the text says, or rather does, can really mean anything
precisely because it can mean anything, and this “meaning-so-much” is an
irresistible invitation to queer inquiry. For queer studies, the emergence of a
queer subtext in “Das Marionettentheater” is not necessarily a good thing.2
For one, it reinforces the regrettable conceit, as Michel Foucault noted, that
the real or hidden truth of a text is always a sexual one that assumes the
form of a confession, not all that dissimilar from Herr C—’s for the disso-
lute pleasured offered by Gliedermänner (men of members) or the narrator’s
for an ephebe in distress. For another, it aligns queerness once again with
dissemblement.3 He, who not unlike Kleist’s text, can evince any number
of contradictory gestures, who can present himself in any number of guises,
is how one comes to designate the homosexual, if for no other reason than
his/its essence, which would link, clarify, and assemble the effusion of affects,
is missing, hidden, or closeted.4 Do we really know anything, for example,
about the narrator, save that he observes and engages strangers who frequent

55
56 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

theaters of ill-repute and bathhouses where boys pose before mirrors? But
how would we speak of same-sex desire or same-sex sex acts without the
epistemological crucible of the closet, even if the content of that closet is
now widely accepted as an open secret?5 On the one hand, a queer reading
that seeks to maintain a balance between surface meaning and deep meaning
reinscribes the very episteme from which it sought liberation. On the other
hand, demonstrating how such a reading is pure invention undermines its
epistemological power and thus begs the question as to whether we need to
take a break from sexuality, to paraphrase once again Jane Halley.6
The break is something more than simply eschewing queer subtexts or
infrastructural supports that buttress constructions of sexuality. Rather, the
break is from those readings that seek to find themselves reflected in the text,
that pursue a textual narcissism by discovering their own readerly strategies
confirmed by or in the text. Narcissism is certainly foregrounded in Kleist’s
text, given that its central example, or the example in the middle of the
text, concerns an ephebe ensorcelled by his own image in the mirror and
chagrined by the failure of that mirror to return the desired self-reflection.
What is queerer, we might ask? To admire oneself in the mirror as one dries
one’s foot and think such beauty is comparable to a Greek statue, as the
ephebe does? Or to find that the person in the mirror is not the person
one thought one was, which the ephebe also discovers? That means I will
be operating with two very different understandings of “queer.”7 The first
simply refers to same-sex desire but is embedded in the narcissistic textual
practices alluded to. The second is one that disables reading insofar as no
logic can contain or otherwise explain the signifying chain of the text or its
own reading. If we recall the distinction Freud offered about narcissism from
the previous chapter, the former would correspond to a naïve narcissism, or
a queer reading that seeks its own reflection in the text. The latter would
undermine such self-sameness through a critical reflection that disables any
form of self-recognition. Both uses are in play here to resist the self-sameness
that queer by definition should disable. That begs the question as to what
kind of Literaturwissenschaft can operate without a hypothesis that seeks
compelling proof of itself. While much of this will become clear below,
the most concise answer is a queer one. The essay that follows is thus an
attempt to violate the protocols of reading while still remaining readable.
The previous chapter supplied blanks as it attempted to pronounce
the abomination that the “emancipated” but “closeted” Jew had become.
The familiar anecdote from the essay in which the narrator would assert
that a dancer with a prosthetic leg excels at her craft does not exhaust the
 Queer Prosthetics 57

text’s reliance on prosthetics to sustain its argument. As the Andreas Kraß’s

reading demonstrates, the epistemological crucible of the closet operates as
an interpretive prosthetic to overcome an interpretive paralysis that disables
resolution of the text’s most stubborn ambiguities. At the same time, the
use of the term in linguistics is instructive. A prosthesis or prosthetic, as
the Greek origin of the term (to add to,) suggests, is a metaplasm in which
the addition of a letter or a syllable to the beginning of a word does not
change its basic meaning. Romance languages offer several examples; the
Latin speciālis became especial in Spanish and Old French. It is a placeholder,
marking or denoting nothing but an affect (or effect?) whose nonproductive
contribution to meaning can best be described as queer. What might be
described as “apheresis” in Schlemihl, the removal of a sound or, as in this
case, all sound, now comes to be pronounced or said. The temptation to
make such saying mean something is what, I argue, needs to be refused.8
Read as such, Kleist’s text makes a mess of sexuality. If it responds to
an interrogator about sexuality—as I believe it does—it equivocates, but the
manner described above as symptomatically and inescapably homosexual.
Rather, it invents what might be considered an impossible sexuality—a
male tribadism, to anticipate Heine’s term for August von Platen’s less than
closeted proclivities.9 More to the point, sexuality in the text is an append-
age or supplement, a prosthetic device. Any reading that seeks to find itself
reflected in the text comes only to be another appendage: a reading of the
narrator’s reading of his conversation with Herr C—, which is a reading of
the interlocutor’s positions, which is a reading of where they stand physi-
cally and argumentatively in relation to each other. In such fashion, the
text—obscured, hidden, or even secured amid a surfeit of readerly affects—
creates its own closet. These affects can just as easily be called, to cite the
text, the Ziererei, the ornamentation that afflicts dancers whose center of
gravity, unlike that of marionettes, is decentered and thus renders their
performance graceless. The sexual character of the text thus lies in a retreat
from self-exposure—and again we might recall Schlemihl holed up in his
cabinet—but such a retreat is merely the misprision produced by reading
doubling back on itself. The text becomes its own self-ornament or Schmuck.
The purpose of this chapter then is twofold: to adumbrate how sexu-
ality comes to be the truth of a text and to explore how a queer reading,
which challenges the standards of any hermeneutic protocols, is perhaps
more promising for queer studies because it renders the text susceptible
to unpredictable or even ungovernable temptations. To that end, I apply a
seemingly invented term, “male tribadism,” to the text to justify that term’s
58 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

use, even if it has no real meaning; it is, in other words, interchangeable

with the second use of “queer” cited above. If for the sake of shorthand we
summarize Kleist’s “Marionettentheater,” as tentative proof of the misalign-
ments of knowledge and truth, the (mis)use of “male tribadism” is oddly
responsive to the text’s own indices. The second part of my essay is a reading
of Helmut Schneider’s “Deconstruction of the Hermeneutic Body: Kleist
and the Discourse of Classical Aesthetics” and, as mentioned above, Andreas
Kraß’s “Der Stachel im Fleische: Kleists’ Marionettentheater—ein Queer
Reading” (The Thorn in the Flesh . . .).10 The point is to demonstrate how
a self-proclaimed queer reading reconstructs that body to rescue hermeneutic
inquiry. But since Kraß’s reading relies on the performative aspects of the
text, its dialogics, one question that remains necessarily unanswered is to
what extent the staging of a queer reading exposes the hermeneutic body
as a construct incapable of confession, sexual or otherwise. Finally, I will
attempt to demonstrate how a non-narcissistic reading might proceed. What
kind of interpretive praxis might be involved? To do so, male tribadism,
insofar as it may refuse a binary logic, may be unreadable in precisely the
anti-hermeneutic terms described above; the term serves then to describe what
cannot be hypothesized.11 With respect to the previous chapter’s description
of narcissism, this chapter further explores the two forms, a simple one and
a critically mediated one, by linking them to textual practices of reading or
of reading oneself into the text.
Let me put this another way. Male tribadism is anything but a telling
taxonomic term. Heine’s coining of the phrase in the tenth and eleventh
chapters of the “Baths of Lucca” to mock Carl Gustav von Platen is intended
to name the unnamable, the unnatural orientation of a poet so fey, repressed,
and regressive that any form of self-expression is restored only through
artificial means. Platen cloaks himself, according to Heine, in the drag of
tradition (ghasels), disavowing confident expression of his sexual proclivities.
The temptation is to couple his lifeless verse, geistlos, if you will, with the
lifelessness or Geistlosigkeit of a puppet, the Abgüsse or copies of the classi-
cal statue, the thorn picker, or the physically restrained bear that all serve
as models of grace in “Das Marionettentheater.”12 My intention is not to
succumb to temptation and look for queerness in “Das Marionettentheater”
by deeming it “Platenic” or “Platenesque.” What I argue is that sexuality is
a default position that is queer, not because homoerotic undercurrents are
brought to the surface, but rather only if it truly defaults, if it becomes
an indefensible position of last resort, which is certainly reminiscent of the
defensive posturing and remarks by the text’s interlocutors.13 In other words,
 Queer Prosthetics 59

when no other interpretive strategy can be sustained, sexuality becomes the

crucible by default for reading the text.

Defensive Reading

The first evidence of being on the defensive is produced by Herr C— in

response to the narrator challenging his being sighted at a theater that appeals
to the masses (Pöbel) and has recently been denounced by the duke.14 To
defend his guilty pleasures, Herr C— will eventually recite nonsense: “In
cases where the movements are crooked [krumm], it appears that the law
of their crookedness is of the first or, at most, the second order; and in this
case, only elliptically” (Kleist 340) (In Fällen, wo sie krumm sei, scheine
das Gesetz ihrer Krümmung, wenigstens von der ersten oder höchstens
zweiter Ordnung; und auch in diesem letzten Fall nur elliptisch).15 When
such crooked, or at best elliptical, reasoning fails to obtain, he seeks refuge
in the straightforward reasoning of algebra and geometry: “More likely, the
movements of his fingers [the machinist’s] behave somewhat like numbers of
their logarithms or asymptotes to their hyperbola” (Kleist 340) (“Vielmehr
verhalten sich die Bewegungen seiner Finger . . . etwa wie Zahlen zu ihren
Logarithmen oder die Asymptote zur Hyperbel”). His own excesses or
hyperbole suggest that he must go to great lengths to defend what must be
indefensible; otherwise, he would pursue a straight or gerad line of argumen-
tation. The only point of convergence in this asymptotic reasoning, if one
exists, is hidden, in which case the argument and its effects are symptom-
atic of a secret to be exposed only to the sympathetic. In fact, it is Herr
C—’s reading, or rather his performance of such a reading, that invites an
outing of what appears to be a secret, and this affect or overproduction of
meaning is what arouses the narrator’s curiosity. “Since the utterance [that
a dancer . . . could learn much from a puppet], by dint of the manner in
which it was presented, appeared to be more than mere caprice [Einfall],
so I sat down next to him [liess ich mich bei ihm nieder] in order to hear
more closely the reasons (or grounds) upon which he could support an
unusual assertion” (339). His affect seduces the narrator. The latter, if one
wants to look for queerness here, could be said to kneel, affirming that he
regards all of this as something more than fancy (Einfall) and signaling his
willingness to hear or do more by literally getting on his knees (einfallen).
The narrator’s Einfall, which only occurs after Herr C— ridicules the
narrator’s disbelief by snubbing his nose at the narrator as he simultaneously
60 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

takes a hit of snuff, puts the narrator on the defensive. Demeaned, the
narrator plays along under the cover of the Bible or the third chapter of
the first book of Moses. He sets out to prove to Herr C— that he knows
what it means to lose one’s innocence. He confesses his extended observa-
tion in a bathhouse of an ephebe repeatedly performing for Herr C— the
drying of his foot in a futile attempt to evoke a Greek statue. When the
narrator concludes by asserting that a witness could corroborate his story
“word for word,” his own hyperbolic gesture (Is it really possible for the
witness to repeat the episode word for word?) signals complicity with the
tactics of Herr C—. Such hyperbole is replayed at the end of the essay
when Her C— asks the narrator if he believes his wild tale about a fenc-
ing bear. “Completely! I cried out, with joyous applause [Beifall]; coming
from any stranger in that it is so likely; and so much more coming from
you” (“Volkommen! Rief ich, mit freudigem Beifall; jedwedem Fremden,
so wahrscheinlich sie ist: um wie viel mehr Ihnen!”; Kleist 345) Herr—C’s
success is complete, due in no small measure to the corroboration of the
witness/narrator whom, only pages before, Herr C— had mocked. Their
mutual falling (kneeling) for marionettes (Bei-fall) is now a shared secret,
the content of which is pure hearsay, reinforced by the indirect discourse
of the entire essay. Sexuality, if one aligns the term with the secret of the
text, is produced by the effect of defensive posturing, which in turn gives
rise to hearsay or rumor. Hyperbole, the central affect of the text, is thus
symptomatic of something that comes to be read, as we will see, in terms
of sexuality. My other use of “queer” or male tribadism would decouple
symptoms from affect; that is to say, the text would become asymptomatic;
sexuality/meaning and performance/affect would not intersect. In the language
of the text, hyperbole would become asymptotic.
The most explicitly defensive gesture or gesturing in the text is the
parrying of the fencing bear, so we are told, as he humbles Herr C—. He
is, of course, the perfect reader. “Eye [in] to eye, as if he read into my soul,
he stood there, the claws ready to attack [schlagfertig; more often, it means
quick-witted], and if my thrusts were not seriously meant, he didn’t move”
(Kleist 345; “Aug in Aug, als ob er meine Stosse nicht ernthaft gemeint
waren, so rührte er sich nicht”). The perfect reader defends himself by looking
directly into the eyes of his opponent or Herr C— such that he can deflect
the thrusts of his opponent or recognize when there is no thrust behind the
gesture. If this kind of eye contact is a reading of the soul, as Herr C—
suspects, then reading beneath the surface is nothing more than parrying
and not falling for feints. This link between reading and fencing establishes
 Queer Prosthetics 61

the performative as defensive and even paralyzed. At its most aggressive, the
bearer of grace or the perfect reader is schlagfertig or ready to strike.
The emphasis is on a “thrustless” reading, which is nonetheless as
quick-witted as the repartee of the essay’s interlocutors. Such repartee, initi-
ated when the narrator puts Herr C— on the defensive for hanging around
theaters of ill repute, is itself a reading enabled by perfect eye contact. But
being eye to eye, being the eye of the other (Aug in Aug) is to read oneself
and become one’s own target, thereby paralyzing the reader. Reading thus
needs to miss its target if the reader is to escape unharmed. Misreading is
called for, which for a perfect reader like the bear is at best paradoxical.
But insofar as his reading is both a delayed response and a deflection, his
reflection in the eye of the opponent is off, temporally displaced. “We see
that in the organic world the becoming darker and weaker of a reflection
is directly proportional to grace becoming more radiant and commanding.”
(“Wir sehen, das in dem Mase, als in der organischen Welt, die Reflexion
dunkler und schwächer wird, die Grazie darin immer strahlender und
herrschender hervortritt”; Kleist 345.) If we accept Herr C—’s conclusion,
then only a weak and dim (self-) reflection can produce the perfect kind of
reader, such as the fencing bear. Grace depends upon poor lighting, which
may explain why the interlocutors meet in the evening. These darker aspects
of grace will be discussed below. What is particularly curious here is how
grace depends on some kind of delay or deflection, but is that inherent in
grace or something produced by a self-consciously postlapsarian text? That is
to say, even if self-reflection is queered or not the perfectly narcissistic mir-
roring of the self that would preempt ornamentation, it mirrors perfectly the
text’s structure of deferral, whether such deferral be the delay in transcribing
the discussion with Herr C— or the deferred return to a state of grace.
If hyperbole, as the affect (even Grundstimmung) of the text, results from
the incongruity of the text’s rhetoric with its meaning or a misalignment
of the two, then the historical moment of which the text declares itself a
part guarantees this disconnect.
Stated otherwise, rhetorical embellishment is all any reading can
accomplish, which aligns itself perfectly with the misalignment of the text.
Is it at all possible then to perform an incongruous reading, which I use
here synonymously with the second meaning of “queer”? Or does any
execution of such a reading merely reproduce what it sees of itself in the
text, its own embellishment? To repeat, the hope for the defensive reader,
tied and bound to seeing himself reflected in the text or in the eye of the
other, is to misread or miss reading by dint of a delay or a deferral, however
62 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

graceless he may become as a result. In the next section, I examine how

male tribadism as a nonsignifying term, as a placeholder for a practice that
has not yet been named and that has not yet become an orientation, might
offer a possibility of preserving the incongruity. The approach, if it is to
seek a queer possibility in the text, must, in keeping with the indices of
the text, be defensive.

Reading Ass Backwards or Entering Paradise

through the Back Door

Now, let me defend my reasons as to why male tribadism is appropriate

as a heuristic device or rather an asymptotic term. To begin, too much
evidence now exists to question the very use of any of the vocabulary
invoked today to describe same-sex sex desire. It is not only that the use of
homosexuality, or even sexuality, is anachronistic—the term is not coined
until the later nineteenth century—but the manner in which we could read
any such subtext presumes that the scene(s) of seduction be read consistent
with the same semiotic chain that animates more contemporary attempts
to disclose the “real” truth, which is inevitably a sexual one.16 The problem
is particularly vexing when one is working with Kleist. His letter to Ernst
von Pfuel from January 1805 is instructive: “I could have slept with you
dear boy; my entire soul embraced you! I have often observed your beauti-
ful body with truly girlish feelings, when you, before my eyes, entered the
lake in Thun” ([I]ch hätte bei Dir schlafen können. Du lieber Junge; so
unmarmte Dich meine ganze Seele. Ich habe Deinen schönen Leib oft,
wenn Du in Thun vor meinen Augen in den See stiegest, mit wahrhaft
mädchenhaften Gefuülen betrachtet). But as Joachim Pfeiffer warns, Kleist’s
playfulness with such erotically charged tropes cannot be used for purposes
of attribution of sexuality, since sexuality has no ontological status at the
time (Pfeiffer 217).17 Rather—and Pfeiffer suggests that this holds for all of
Kleist’s texts—the letters “prefigure a reality in which people are no longer
tied down to fixed orders of subjectivity” (Pfeiffer 227). The dialogic dance
of “Das Marionettentheater” in which the two interlocutors repeatedly
reposition themselves (i.e., Their arguments are not straightforward) with
respect to each other simultaneously articulates a disavowal of any sexual
position. If—and I will speak to this later—queer sexuality is tied to what
Kraß calls the penetration fantasies of the interlocutors (Kraß 131), their
perambulations doom such fantasies. In that case, only the bound and tied
 Queer Prosthetics 63

fencing bear would be capable of a sexuality, unless we rethink sexuality as

merely a textual specter that can be spoken about if its lack of an ontologi-
cal status is acknowledged, as something that will come to be spoken about
once a vocabulary for sexuality is invented. In any case, the text makes a
mess of sexuality. Any response to such questions is a recent invention and
requires an invented term such as Heine’s.
However unprepared our modern discourse on sexuality is to imagine
or define something such as male tribadism, using “Das Marionettenthe-
ater” to entertain such a definition means—from what was just said in the
previous paragraph—that it will have no meaning other than to define or
coordinate a field of gestures and affects, to discover, as with marionettes, a
Schwerpunkt or a center of gravity. The identification of a center of gravity
risks granting sexuality ontological status. It suggests a certain inevitability
to positing the truth of all secrets as asexual if for no other reason that
sexuality offers the text a center of gravity, albeit a specious one. If the
discordant effects of the text, the incongruity of its examples (such as the
comparison of a three-dimensional dancer with a Teniers painting or the
image of a concave mirror after it has passed into and returned from infin-
ity) and the persistent repositioning of its interlocutors can be harmonized
by queering them, that new-found harmony is at odds with any language
available to the text when it was written. If a Schwerpunkt can be said
to coordinate the four installments of the text, it is only the reliance on
prosthetics—extras, remainders, or affects—that comes to be essentialized
around a center of gravity.
So what are these supplements? To begin, there is the dialogic structure
that allows the argument to elide its many sticking points. Simply put, the
narrator’s sudden reversal and enthusiastic endorsement of Herr C—’s startling
claims rhetorically settle what logic has not, for example, that those with
artificial limbs can dance more gracefully than the famed P— in her role as
Daphne and the young F— as Paris (Kleist, 342). The dialogue, moreover,
is reproduced as indirect conversation so that it is already a fact, even if the
facts of the argument themselves don’t all add up.18 This pattern is apparent
in the context. The marionette is hardly self-sufficient; it depends upon a
machinist, just as the fencing bear depends upon an opponent and just as
the boy in the bathhouse depends upon an onlooker and widely viewed
copies of the thorn picker, who likewise depends upon being penetrated
by a thorn in the foot. In other words, the extensive reach of the argu-
ment from “Genesis” to a return to paradise is really a series of extensions
or extended examples that can only repeat the logical impossibilities of the
64 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

previous ones. The rhetorical power of the argument and its appearance in
four installments contribute as well to the interlocutors’ dance around what
seems to be the missing center or actual topic of the discourse.
To frame this discussion of supplements in the terms of the previous
section, do these supplements complement each other to form a perfect whole
that embodies grace? Or is the fit imperfect; is there a (temporal) gap that
produces a reflection, such as in the case of the ephebe, that is off? In that
instance, the supplement is not proper or essential, but rather an ornament
or affect whose most striking feature is queer or odd, a linguistic prosthesis.
And if the production of such supplements is seemingly endless, is the affect
not exaggerated or hyperbolic? Herr C— concedes, at least in the case of
the marionette, that there is something mysterious or geheimnisvoll (Kleist
340). The mysterious might not be the result of a secret, a unifying truth
of which all expression is a perfect reflection, but rather of crookedness or
deception. The queer and secret truth of the text is true only insofar as it
reproduces not an underlying or deep truth but a deflection, an imperfect
reflection that can never be straightened. Like the narrator at the apparent
pinnacle of understanding, at that moment when he means to be of one
mind with Herr C—, the Schwerpunkt around which these affects would
collect is itself a bit distracted and dispersed (zerstreut; Kleist 345).
Now, how is it that these supplements acquire a homoerotic character?
The short answer is that the turning point in the text, the moment when
disdain and skepticism are replaced by unconditional endorsement, is its
most homoerotically charged scene. The subject matter, a naked young
boy drying his foot in a bathhouse with reference to ancient Greece, fuels
whispers of something homosexual. The narrator/boy configuration repeats
the Socratic model of instruction, which is rehearsed as well by the relation
between Herr C— and the narrator. Since “Platonic” served at this time,
according to Paul Derks, as a euphemism for pederasty and male-male sex,
the essence of the homoerotic in the text is something extra-textual, or at
best a euphemism that misnames what it would describe.19 Insofar as the
interlocutors speak from postlapsarian positions, the text is itself an exercise
in misnaming. That makes the use of male tribadism all the more inviting.
At this point, it should be clear that male tribadism, as an invented
term to describe Platen for Heine’s readers, has no justifiable relation to
the text, save for an invented one. And that invented relation—dare I call
it an unnatural one?—constitutes a “back door” justification for its use, the
back door reminiscent of the one through which no one enters paradise,
at least under the terms set forth by the text. That is to say, an unrelated
 Queer Prosthetics 65

term is defined by a text that has nothing to do with the term. Otherwise
meaningless, the term becomes the meaning or secret truth of the text. The
logic is circular. But so is Kleist’s text: the argument is justified once the
interlocutors espouse each other’s arguments, and that espousal is justified
by the arguments. Such circular logic can also be viewed as serial reproduc-
tion, particularly since the text appeared in four installments in the Berliner
Abendblätter (December 12, 13, 14 and 15, 1810). In any case, the text or
rather the reading of Genesis by Herr C— and the narrator, the reading of
that reading by the narrator in his reconstitution of his conversation with
Herr C—, and the reading of each installment of what came before, not
to mention our reading of those readings—his endless series of concentric
circles calls out for a Schwerpunkt, something muted or repressed in the
text to keep the text from bleeding. The thorn in the argument needs to be
extracted. But once extracted, it is extraneous or as queer to the text as are
the actual thorn and cries of the original, injured athlete. In other words,
the text is nothing without supplements, and only a queer supplement and/
or Schwerpunkt—and this is the final component of my reason for import-
ing male tribadism—offers reading “Das Marionettentheater” salvation. It
becomes a default hermeneutic to close or rescue the circular logic of “Das
Marionettentheater,” which is precisely what the text demands. In other
words, the use of “male tribadism” questions and renders suspect the very
reading it enables. But arousing suspicion gives rise to the very rumors that
sponsor a queer reading.

A Prosthetic Return to Paradise

Still, male tribadism must mean something. That is, the long answer to the
question posed above needs to show how a queer reading responds to what
Helmut Schneider has called the deconstruction of the hermeneutic body in
“Das Marionettentheater.” Only then will it be possible to offer a different
response to the challenge posed by Schneider’s reading, one that does not
succumb to making queerness the essence of the text’s secret. Until now,
I have been trying to develop or put into play a dirempted or non-self-
identical meaning of “queer,” acknowledging that the very use of the term
is anachronistic, which is precisely what makes its use so inviting. The text,
as evident from the first section, is committed to retrospection or a reading
that leads one to the back door. But what does it mean to enter the back
door, or to quote the text, to enter “paradise through the back door”? (Kleist
66 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

342). We know, from the previous section that it has something to do with
supplements that alternate between placing one reader, initially Herr C—,
and then the other on the defensive. This alteration aligns one reader with
the other, but the alignment is imperfect, subject to deflection. That has
two consequences: it invites positing a Schwerpunkt (center of gravity) for
reflection, and it protects the reader from his own reflection. The question
is then whether the use of male tribadism keeps both of these invitations
open? Does the tension between a reading that sees itself reflected in the
text and one that misses itself by producing a supplement (that is likewise
read and misread in the same manner suggested by the remark that there
are two routes or lines (of thought) that lead to the back door of paradise?
Or is any narcissistic image split from the beginning, pursuing itself from
a divided origin? As I move now to track in more detail those two possible
routes, I do so, not surprisingly, with two intentions: (1) to show how a
self-described queer reading comes full circle and thus restores Schneider’s
deconstructed hermeneutic body, and (2) to maintain that this restored body
is somehow always already unreadable, subject to what I described above as a
temporal delay generated, as in the case of the ephebe, by self-consciousness.20
The most apt and yet puzzling description of this dual task is found in
the text itself: “. . . just as two intersecting lines, converging on one side of
a point, reappear on the other side after passing through infinity.” (. . . Wie
sich der Durchschntt zweier Linien, auf der einen Seite eines Punkts, nach
dem Durchgang durch das Unendliche, plötzlich wieder auf der anderen
Seite einfindet; Kleist 345). The point (of the argument or the fencer’s
thrust?) is where the two lines converge, but that point of convergence is
on the move, diverging from itself as it betrays itself by going over to the
other side. Just think of how the narrator as well betrays his own position
by going to the other side, which in a queer context would signal his suc-
cessful recruitment by Herr C—. And if his convergence is also a kind of
divergence, it is no wonder that he is zerstreut, distracted or strewn about.
Given that the story of the ephebe entranced by his mirror image signals
the narrator’s successful recruitment by Herr C—, it is no surprise that the
mirror serves as another example of perfect consciousness, or rather grace,
to follow up on the one about intersecting lines. “. . . [O]r the image in
a concave mirror, after it has distanced itself in infinity, suddenly returns
dense before us.” (oder das Bild des Hohlspiegels, nachdem es sich ins
Unendliche entfernt hat, plötzlich wieder dicht vor uns tritt; Kleist 345).
Certainly, unpacking this image is no simple task, not the least because the
instrument of reflection, the concave mirror, is itself imperfect. Like the
 Queer Prosthetics 67

description of the marionette’s Schwerpunkt it is bent or gekrümmt. What

can be said is that the restoration of its density (wieder dicht), which is an
expression of perfect grace, is dependent upon a temporal delay, without
which repetition (wieder) would be impossible. In other words, like male
tribadism, grace is anachronistic.
Schneider emphatically proposes a deconstructive reading as a response
to the latest wave of theoretical currents that have shaped the hermeneutic
understanding of “Das Marionettentheater.” He restores a historical context
by responding in large measure to the aesthetic values of German classicism,
particularly its understanding of grace as articulated by Schiller. Subsequent
readings, so Schneider, conformed to the tenets of Geistesgeschichte, accepting
almost naïvely the text’s conviction that a fractured self would be restored
at some later date through a higher level of consciousness until Paul de
Man undid the text’s questionable claims by attending to its rhetoric
(Schneider 210). By asserting that Kleist’s text inverts the classical model of
grace—externalizing through its staging what for Schiller was internalized
or spiritualized—Schneider links the history of the text’s reception with
something already predicted by the text. If for Schiller “grace is the stag-
ing of nature by a self-empowering human subject which yearns to reflect
itself precisely in that which is beyond its control, [manipulating the body’s
contingency],” Klest’s text, Schneider argues, fractures the phantasm of a
unified body (of reading) by constituting its arguments through staging or
through the exterior movements that describe the interlocutors positioning
of themselves and their arguments with respect to each other (Schneider
212). The text thus comes to question the priority of the signified over the
signifier insofar as the mechanics of the argument eclipse the essence of
the argument. That potential inversion extends from the Äusserungen, the
utterances or externalizing of the players themselves, to their physical move-
ments, to the discourse itself. Virtually repeating what was argued above,
Schneider asserts that “the rhetorical and gestural appearance of the dancer’s
speech . . . causes the narrator to draw closer and interrogate him about
the reasons for or behind such a statement [the superiority of marionettes
over dancers]” (Schneider 214). The point, however, is not to assert that the
performative takes precedence or that gesture becomes the argument itself,
but rather that it opens up a space that Schneider paradoxically names an
“internal space” of “externalized inferiority” (Schneider 214.).
That space is a split that cannot be sutured because it extends to
the language of the text, or, as Schneider notes, the “consistent play on
the literal meaning of words” (214). The following examples are offered:
68 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

Äusserung [making an external utterance], vorbrachte, [bring forth or up,

present], Gründe [grounds, reasons] (Schneider 214.). Decisive here is that
the mechanics of the argument respond to the literal meaning of the words
all the while asserting, as a precondition of grace, that interiority or what
the text calls Geist, can align itself with exteriority. But in a postlapsarian
world, even Herr C—would have to concede that language as the instru-
ment of consciousness cannot secure such an alignment. This is why the
history of the text’s reception, its correspondence to a loosely constructed
Geistesgeschichte, is so compelling; it responds to the text’s charge to suture
that split, which is every bit as much of a wound as the one caused by
the thorn in the classical statue. Through a historical consciousness that in
one moment would attend to the spirit of the word and in the next to its
literal meaning, one would come, as the interlocutors insist, full circle and
attain “infinite consciousness” (unendliches Bewußtsein; Kleist 345), pro-
vided all the intervening supplements or readings could be sublated.21 The
phrase encapsulates the problem, since unendlich could just as easily describe
quite literally an infinite or unending back-and-forth between both modes
of meaning and both interlocutors. This back-and-forth further explains
the narrator’s distracted state at a moment of supposed lucidity. He must
occupy two historical spaces at once, the impossibility of which necessitates
an interlocutor and a serial delay in relaying his conversation with Herr C—.
In fact, Schneider’s reading suggests that over time the fracture
only deepens rather than heals. The most telling example for Schneider
is the following passage from Kleist: “Und der Vorteil, den diese Puppe
vor lebendigen Tänzern voraus haben würde? Der Vorteil? Zuvorderst ein
negativer, mein vortrefflicher Freund, nämlich dieser, dass sie sich niemals
zierte” (“And the advantage that this puppet in advance would have over
live dancers? First and foremost, a negative one, my excellent friend, namely
this, that there is no self-embellishment”; Schneider 216; Kleist 341).22 The
conspicuous literality or “exterior side of language,” literally its “fore-part,”
represents the “rhetorical décor” or Zier of speech (Schneider 217). The
linguistic body overreaches, extends beyond itself to the point, according
to Schneider, that it breaks apart. The materiality of language becomes its
own content despite Herr C—’s passionate repudiation of such. He dis-
misses Madame P—’s performance of Daphne because she bends as if she
were about to break (Kleist 342), but in the sentence just cited, the literal
aspect of language, its forepart, can be said to do just that, to bend the
argument to its breaking point. The hyperbolic repetition of the prefix vor
becomes a linguistic filigree, a mere decorative thread that Herr C— can-
 Queer Prosthetics 69

not help spinning even though such ornamentation (a prosthesis) is at best

regrettable. His language is at odds with itself, and while he insists that his
consciousness is advanced enough to recognize the split, the expression of
such recognition only frays further the thread that links signifier and signi-
fied. Schneider is thus justified to remark, “In an act of reverse empathy,
the soul is constructed through exterior movements . . . soul or ‘Geist’ is
reduced to nothing” (219). In terms of my reading, the material remains
of an argument, whose back has been broken or been reduced to nothing,
come back to life once they are queered or call forth a prosthetic so that a
calculable logic, call it logarithmic, can account for the dismembered remains
of a shattered consciousness. The queer reader inspires or blows spirit back
into the limbs of the deconstructed body.
As Schneider’s use of such terms as “inversion” and “castrated,” as well
as the above passage’s emphasis of “fore-part” suggest, the next generation
of readers in this back-and-forth, give-and-take history would be destined
by the text to invert Schneider’s reading by clipping its foreparts to preserve
interpretive unity. Andreas Kraß’s queer reading is such an inversion, all
the more queer for its reliance on equating male-male desire with reading
itself, or at least the kind of reading that occurs under the sign of a double
taboo (Kraß 125). Both the puppet theater and the Abendblätter were pub-
licly censored, so that the text was always already castrated, and its strewn
(zerstreut) foreparts testify to the procedure. It would be more accurate,
however, to describe Kraß’s reading as a reattachment of these dismembered
supplements, which can just as easily be described as prosthetics, as artificial
limbs to allow the argument to re-find a leg(s) to stand on. That requires,
in keeping with the logic of the text, discovering a Schwerpunkt. Such
probing with prosthetic devices is, moreover, perhaps the nearest we have
come to unifying the manifold uses of male tribadism in this essay around
a center of gravity. In other words, a taboo, a twofold taboo—it takes two
male tribadists to tango—resurrects the possibility of reading for meaning,
which I have aligned, in keeping with Freud’s reading of such self-mirroring
in the previous chapter, with a simple narcissistic reading. It responds to
the text’s homoerotic cues for seeing one’s grace affirmed in a mirror. It is
not the ephebe who does so, but, in a larger sense, the interlocutors who
seek affirmation of their positions in their counterparts.
The sexual undercurrent of Kraß’s reading is announced immediately.
The dialogue between the narrator and Herr C— is redefined as a Verführung
(seduction but also misleading), which, in concert with the biblical references
of the text, leads Kraß to further recast the text as the staging of a seduction:
70 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

“The text is about the seduction; about the reciprocal seduction of the main
figures, on the one hand, and the seduction of the reader by the narrator, on
the other” (Kraß 123). Since the text itself is about a fall from grace, Herr
C— is seen—via his argumentative stances—to lure the narrator to partake of
the “forbidden fruit in which is concealed an erotic and hermeneutic promise”
(Kraß 123). And, if the secret of the text is indeed a queer one, the narrator’s
invitation to the reader is likewise a scene of seduction. The gesture is remark-
able for two reasons: first—and this is not surprising—it couples interpretive
acts with erotic ones. Second, the performance of the text, its linguistic or
dialogic supplement, is retrieved, but such partaking of the forbidden fruit for
a second time so as to retrieve or expose the hermeneutic promise is queer:
“it is not a man and a woman who perform the fall from grace, ‘Sündenfall,’
but rather the narrator and a ballet dancer” (Kraß 123). It takes two men
to take the bite for a second time. The second eating can restore interpretive
unity to the text only by restaging the fall as a gay seduction scene: “Each
interlocutor attempts to read the other, and each attempts to make himself
readable for the other. The narrated stores are strategic maneuvers in a game
of hide and seek” (Kraß 124). The only way to understand what it means to
eat the fruit a second time is to just do it, and the only way to do it is to
stage a male same-sex scene of seduction. Remarkably, so many of the text’s
details now fall into place: why else would the two men meet in an open
garden on a winter’s evening, when most would prefer “to hole themselves
up in an illuminated and heated room”? (Kraß 126). In this context, is there
any other way to read the command “Thrust! Thrust!” (Stossen Sie! Stossen
Sie! ) than as a “penetration fantasy” that in turn “alludes” to the statue of
the thorn picker (Kraß 131)? And penetration, linked as it is to fantasies
of domination by competing fencers and/or interlocutors, is at play in the
bathhouse as the narrator-cum-pedagogue seeks to instruct and thus seduce
or mislead (verführen) the naked boy.
The narrator’s sudden conversion is due less to the cogency of the
ballet dancer’s penetrating insights about puppets but rather to his own
conversancy with penetration fantasies. He knows what it means to pen-
etrate and, based on his reaction Herr C—’s examples, to be penetrated.
As Kraß writes, “the consternation of the narrator quickly turns to shame,
and he lowers his gaze” (128). His shame is his outing; he is exposed. But
there is one more twist, one that involves role reversal or inversion. Whereas
the narrator’s coming-out story allows him to assume the role of peda-
gogue and dominator, he plays the role of the submissive with the dancer:
“[S]o liess ich mich nieder.” This is the phrase that signaled his willingness
 Queer Prosthetics 71

from the start to entertain the dancer’s fancies. Kraß pushes the meaning of
the phrases still further. The “last chapter in the history of the world,” the
yet-to-be-written return to paradise, has actually always already been written
with the going down of the narrator (Kraß 132). His confession, which is
a sexually charged obeisance, thereby becomes the secret or concealed truth
of the text, but only if the repositionings of the body (of his argument) are
reduced or stabilized through a binary lens of dominator/dominated, men-
tor/student, and so on. Paradise becomes inseparable from the pleasures of
a text that permits wooer and suitor to trust in a winter’s garden.
Male tribadism now has a very real textual dimension; it is a queer
reading that offers hermeneutics its salvation. It collects the dismembered
parts of the deconstructed hermeneutic body and finds new holes in the
text to plug them into; that is, the gaps uncovered by arguments such as
Schneider’s become vessels for a queer content. With each thrust (Stoss),
Kraß’s reading lends Schneider’s amputated text a new leg to stand on. But
just as Herr C— concedes that those who dance with a prosthetic have a
very limited range, a queer reading restricts its signifying potential by con-
verting its content into a secret truth buried in the text. If, as I suggested
at the beginning of this essay, the best hope for a queer reading is for it
somehow to be unreadable, then the question remains: to what extent is such
a salutary hermeneutic “not the last chapter in the history of the world”?

The Last Chapter, not the Last Chapter

The second meaning of “queer,” which I have linked with male tribadism,
now seems at best obscured, lest it can be demonstrated that Kraß’s reading
signals its own fall from hermeneutic grace. If we return to his reading of
the central and most homoerotically charged episode of Kleist’s text, it is
not so certain that the queer hermeneutic body is as hale as suggested. A
reversal of roles renders whatever sexual act that would announce Kraß’s
last chapter of history unreadable; it points as well to an uncontainable
production of difference, including two men, and not a man and a woman,
reenacting the fall from grace. Knowledge of the forbidden act thus remains
as forbidden as the act itself. One might even say penetration of the text’s
sexual secrets only multiplies its interpretive gaps. To put it another way,
male lesbians have too much to play with.
So much was perhaps suggested by the organization of Kraß’s essay,
insofar as he devotes a section to each of the four dates on which Kleist’s
72 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

text appeared in the Abendblätter. But there is a remainder, an introduction

entitled “The Allegory of Reading,” that engages de Man’s reading while
pleading for textual unity to follow. De Man, according to Kraß, fails to
consider who/what is the object of reading and, in turn, the subject (Kraß
124). While that opens an avenue for Kraß’s own queer take on the text
in which the interlocutors seek to read each other, this additional install-
ment, the section that does not correspond to a date of publication precedes
everything else. What is extra or supplementary is there from the beginning.
To be sure, this is a minor observation, assignable to the formalities of
academic writing as it is to anything else, save that Kleist’s text is unthink-
able if it is divorced from academic enterprises of reading. More to the
point, the extra that is in play from the beginning anticipates several crucial
aspects of the episode in question here. According to Kraß, the narrator
signals his complicity with Herr C—’s mode of understanding when the
former assumes the role of the pedagogue with the ephebe (Kraß 129). If
earlier the narrator had fallen (ließ sich nieder), which, at least metaphorically,
was preceded by the fall of Herr C—’ as he deigned to visit the masses at
the puppet theater, it is now the young boy who falls from grace and for
the antics of a self-confessed, perverse narrator/pedagogue. Sooner or later,
everybody falls but also rises. Today’s object of derision is soon the seducer,
and this give-and-take can only preclude fulfillment of the narrator’s final
prescription, namely the need to “eat from the tree of knowledge a second
time so as to fall back into a state of innocence” (wieder von dem Baum
der Erkenntnis essen, um in den Stand der Unschuld zurückzufallen). The
problem is twofold. The fallen, even if their subsequent rise is always under
the sign of a seemingly permanent fall from grace, keep falling forward and
never back. (We should recall Schneider’s emphasis on the prefix vor.) As a
result, eating from the tree of knowledge a second time always occurs with
a non-sublatable difference or, to recall the title of Kraß’s opening section,
it is always only allegorical, or, at least, queer sex is.
And queer sex is queer only when it is allegorical, only when it occurs
with a difference. This is all the more evident if one attends to an easily
overlooked aspect of the episode in the bathhouse. Judging from the fact that
the narrator dates the series of failed rehearsals by the ephebe to three years
prior, one can presume that he knew all along the significance of Herr C—’s
remarks. Something encouraged him to be less than forthcoming, to lead
the dancer on. But once the proper context has been supplied, he confesses
his knowledge of how one can be led astray by self-consciousness. That is,
once the dancer’s argumentative thrust puts the narrator on the defensive,
 Queer Prosthetics 73

the latter’s own self-consciousness allows him, if one follows Kraß’s clues, to
be mislead or seduced (verführt); his attending to the latent agenda of the
dancer becomes a rehearsal of the original fall from grace. That the narrator
already knows about the “Book of Moses” is expected; sin is original, but
the sought-after repetition of that fall is queered. The difference of the self
from itself in the beginning replays itself as a scene of same-sex seduction,
which is absolutely different from its first or its biblical enactment. As
stated above, taking a bite from the apple a second time, its reenactment
is queered. Given the narrator’s closing observation of the absolute necessity
of eating from the tree of knowledge a second time to return to innocence,
the path to paradise is a queer one, whereby it is always already routed
through difference (Kleist 345).23 Not only is knowledge of such difference
retrospective (there has to have been a “before” to differ from), but also
all iterations are always by definition delayed. This delay renders a perfect
rendering of the first success or what we referred to above as a narcissistic
triumph impossible. It certainly is true when the reenactment involves men
only. The serpent’s bite in the Bible becomes a thorn in the heel in ancient
Greece, which becomes, as Kraß argues, the narrator’s bite in the foot of
the ephebe (seinen Zahn in den Fuß des Jünglings schlägt; Kraß 131).24
Keep in mind that the narrator intentionally lies to the ephebe and pretends
not to recognize the statue in the boy. The narrator thus encourages the
boy’s failed repeat performances. The narrator queers him by encouraging
the boy to keep taking bites from the tree of knowledge. He seduces him
to keep gazing at himself in the mirror. What will become of the narrator’s
own attempted seduction, be that of the boy or now Herr C—, is one that
follows upon a lie, his a priori decision to mislead (verführen) the boy. The
bite in the foot is, likewise, destined to become a different kind of bite
when Kleist’s male tribadists take their own second bites together.
Since the text is as much about reading as it is about seduction, or the
seduction of reading, the question remains: what does all of the above mean
nfor reading? The tryst between Herr C— and the narrator depends upon a
correct, if not fully forthright, reading of the other’s language and gestures.
But the reading moves in two directions (we might recall the reference above
to two lines passing through infinity), so much so that at the end of the
essay, when the two appear to affirm each other’s self-understanding, their
language withholds something from meaning; it preserves the possibility of
meaning nothing at all, of the strangers taking leave of each other at the
moment of confirmed consensus or assignation. Queer here only means
that two wholly incompatible possibilities coexist and constitute each other.
74 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

(Might not the same be said of male tribadism?) The narrator introduces
his observation about partaking of the forbidden fruit a second time with
the following: “Therefore [mithin], I said a bit distracted” (Kleist 345). I
have already remarked upon the word “distracted,” which also means strewn.
The narrator, in other words, has already departed the space from which
he speaks, a space indicated, no doubt, by “therefore,” or, “literally, “there,”
or “hither.” The narrator’s first word seeks to bring the entire argument to
a head, to lend it direction if not finality, but how can one who is spread
about come to “therefore”? The point of conversion or attraction is already
lost; even while it is being spoken, it is “hither.” The dancer’s last remarks
likewise confirm his absence. “To be sure [allerdings],” he answered, “that is
the last chapter in the history of the world” (. . . das ist das letzte Kapitel
von der Geschichte der Welt; Kleist 345). His first word, “allerdings,” would
appear to recognize a need to reconcile two argumentative threads, to bring
several things together. But his concluding thetic statement holds something
back; it voids the very space of reconciliation and ensuing seduction. Is there
really a last chapter, given that the first was already a rehearsal? If one hears
in the word “last” resonances of its meaning in phrases such as, “That is
the last person I would believe” or “That is the last thing I would want (to
do with you or to do in that position with you?),” the last chapter is not
even the last, not even a chapter in the history of the world. Everything
that has led to this moment has been annulled or invalidated, leaving the
interlocutors to grasp for prosthetics.25

As I stressed in the introduction, the two chapters to follow provide the most
articulate registrations of queer echoes, whose stirrings in earlier chapters
were felt but derided and elided, repressed in service of the nascent nuclear
family and the emerging nation state. The opening discussion of “Death
in Venice” established the central conceit of the project: messianic echoes
were distributed broadly and unevenly in the periods following 1800. And
given the state of our politics today, it was time to reanimate those ener-
gies. To that end, the first three chapters had a dual function: (1) To trace
the construction or even invention of sexuality. What literary devices and
tropes worked to make of the homosexual a type whose goings-on served
to reenforce and extend the reach of the biopolitical regime and its disci-
plines? (2) To expose the sutures in that narrative and listen for echoes or
voices drowned out by dreams of familial bliss or infinitely delayed by the
 Queer Prosthetics 75

queer paths they follow. The next chapter reads Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s
Discourse alongside The Sorrows of Young Werther toward a crystallization,
if you will, of the faint but still audible echoes of the messianic that were
signaled in the first three chapters. In doing so, I work through for the first
time the expression of the messianic variously formulated in the introduc-
tion but finding its most trenchant formulation as follows: I will not have
not loved. The final chapter on Brokeback Mountain will thus trace future
iterations of that formulation in post-Stonewall America.
 4

Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces

Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse and
Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther

Roland Barthes’s 1977 Fragments d’un discours amoureux seeks to secure a site
from which the modern amorous subject, “driven into the backwater of the
unreal,” can speak (1).1 But the fragments, which Barthes calls gestures of
the “lover at work” (4) are “non-narrative” and “non-integrative” (7). That
is to say, the text eschews a hierarchy or vertical structure and embraces
instead an endless stream of utterances that form a “horizontal discourse” (7).
The book can just as easily be described as a collage of citations that come
from at least three sources: “ordinary readings” such as Goethe’s Werther,
“insistent readings” such as those of psychoanalysis, and “occasional readings,”
based in part on conversations with friends (8). These references to authors,
books, and friends are noted in the margins and sometimes in footnotes.
If Barthes’s discourse is original, it is not so in the traditional meaning of
the word, but rather in the manner in which Barthes recites, resituates, and
even reinvigorates what has always already been said elsewhere by others.
And if, as Samuel Weber has argued, Barthes’s earlier S/Z depends upon
a critically unexamined site from which his reading of Balzac’s “Sarrasine”
issues,2 the gestures of A Lover’s Discourse issue from multiple sources so
that the site Barthes would secure for such a discourse is always under (re)
construction, if for no other reason than the amorous subject’s gestures are
performative, with each citation the stage of such performance displaced.
Frankenstein’s miserable creature was, of course, also a fan of Werther.
While it is eager to dismiss the short passage in which the creature praises

77
78 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

the novel as the meeting of two tortured souls forced into isolation by an
unfeeling and uncaring world, the creature’s actual remarks point in a dif-
ferent direction. “This simple and affecting story” arouses strong emotions
in the creature, but such sentiments are not his only reaction to the novel.
“Many options are canvassed; many lights thrown upon [. . .] obscure
subjects” that turn the text into “a never-ending source of speculation and
astonishment” (Shelley 122). But if apparent similarities between the two
would suggest widespread consensus on these topics, Frankenstein’s monster
is not so forthcoming; he simply “refuses to ask into the merits of the case”
(Shelley 122). These remarks by the creature point to an identification with
Werther that is less than complete and that already signals a critical difference.
In this chapter, the obliteration of the self in the face of an insurmount-
able Other, the echoes that return from that pyre—to recall Kristeva—find
expression in Barthes’s reading of Werther. That is, the return of the shattered
self (Werther) allows Barthes to pursue through citation echoes that speak
to a different fate, a different trajectory for impossible or forbidden love. As
we will see, a counter-temporality is constructed to articulate the readiness
or potentiality of these messianic echoes. Earlier chapters posited a terrain
upon which the emerging male homosexual could be (re)-inscribed within
the reaches of the panoptic regime. They also gestured toward something
on the other side or outside of this immanence. In Roland Barthes’s reading
of Werther in A Lover’s Discourse a number of muted queer echoes embed-
ded in Goethe’s text come through repetition and recontextualization to
sound—or not to sound. From out of this “backwater of the unreal” the
amorous subject will not have not been loved.
Nothing is less surprising, therefore, than Barthes’s choice of Werther
as the amorous subject’s preferred interlocutor. Indeed, the expressed aim of
Barthes’s text—a primary language guided by amorous feeling that refuses
“subjugation to the ‘Great Narrative Other’ ” (Barthes 7)—recalls Werther’s
language of tears that bursts forth not from his eyes but rather from his
oppressed heart (Goethe 53).3 Such a language, Barthes asserts, “produces
a myth of grief ” that is bearable only because weeping allows the weeper
to give his body and not his word to the interlocutor” (Barthes 182). In
other words, the language of tears circumvents the word by becoming the
body it would otherwise mediate. And since the body Werther would have,
Lotte’s, is not there or—as he writes in this same letter—is there only in his
dreams, they signal the realness of his grief despite the absence of any other
body or anybody other than tears. Except that there are bodies everywhere.
The primary language of the amorous subject always relies on the fabrica-
 Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces 79

tions of another: Werther has his Klopstock, Ossian, Homer; Barthes, his
Werther, Plato, Proust, Nietzsche, Freud, and in the instance cited above,
Schubert. While that hardly exhausts the list, it suffices to demonstrate that
what the amorous subject most urgently seeks to confess is only always
the language of another. To apply Barthes’s terms, the amorous discourse
that would preempt any response from the “Other” (Barthes 5) is invaded
and occupied by many others, even as it proposes to escape all “forms of
gregarity” (Barthes 1). Thus, the words printed in large type as a headline
that closes Barthes’s introduction, “So it is a lover who speaks and who
says,” is a dissemblance.
If the example above marks one dimension of the lover’s discourse
as vexed, Werther’s letter from January 20 exposes another dimension of
that rift, a brief reading of which will further indicate the direction of the
argument to follow. In this letter, Werther addresses Lotte directly: “Dear
Lotte, I must write to you . . .” (Goethe 64). He then imagines himself
sitting at Lotte’s feet, reading about a fairy tale to pacify the children. At
that point Werther asks whether Albert is in the room and expresses his
regret immediately thereafter for making such an impertinent inquiry. The
expression of regret seems, at the very least, to be as direct a form of expres-
sion as his language of tears, save that it is off the mark, which prompts
Werther in turn to concede its impropriety: “God forgive me that question!”
(Goethe 66). More important, such primacy once again recalls a third, in
this instance Albert, who rather than enabling the lover’s discourse, inspires
it only to still it.
Embedded in the letter is also a temporal curiosity that renders all of
its claims untenable, but as I will argue later, that same temporal disjunc-
tion may ultimately account for Werther’s privileged position in Barthes’s
discourse despite Werther’s failure to deliver a real or immediate discourse
of the heart. For the moment, it is important to note how the letter of
January 20 refers to a time that will have already passed by the time Lotte
reads it. Albert will have been by her side and left her side countless times
when Lotte finally receives Werther’s impertinent remarks. Werther, self-
constructing and self-destructing with each stroke of the pen, will hardly
be self-same. The Werther Lotte reads will already differ from the Werther
Lotte was to have read. Thus, Werther’s irrepressible desire to address Lotte
ends by anticipating its own end. That is to say, immediacy or circumventing
circumlocution not only places Werther outside or in exile from the scene
immediacy calls forth but such scenes of immediacy also project their own
impossibility. For Barthes, who cites Werther more than 50 times, such a
80 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

discourse is never to accede to the mechanisms of control that police the

love story and thus bring it to a satisfactory end (Barthes 1). For Werther,
however he wishes his writing to obtain, it ends by submitting itself to the
very controls Barthes refuses. Once Werther finally hits his mark dead on
with Albert’s pistol after it has passed through Lotte’s hands, an unnamed
editor collects, redacts, and arranges his letters. This de facto executor of
Werther’s will also conducts a thorough enough investigation of Werther’s
last days to offer a pathology of the lover’s self-described sickness unto death
(Goethe 48).4 Barthes’s Werther is at cross purposes with Werther’s narrator,
and that leads me to conclude the introduction with the observation that
cross-purposes may be the precise requirement for hearing echoes of a queer
messianic in Barthes’s reading of Goethe’s Werther.
In pursuing those cross purposes, I will first point to the most striking
dissonance in Barthes’s text, namely his affirmation of Nietzsche’s eternal
return of the same, a saying “Yes” to life in the face of Werther’s unequivo-
cal “No.” Barthes’s citation of Nietzsche introduces a remarkable difference;
the sentimental of the Nietzschean ass replaces the overman. This means
two things: (1) Barthes’s amorous subject, whose representative is a Werther
who says “Yes” to a life that denies life, is conscripted into an order whose
borders depend upon a recoding of Werther’s desire, whereby plenitude is
just as likely a lack. And it is this lack that leads Werther to summon the
father and his law. The retrospective that the editor presents of Werther’s
life, and this holds particularly for how that life is cited by Barthes, invites
a queer reading of Werther’s effects. Moreover, for Barthes’s amorous subject
such a reading of these effects has always already occurred. (2) Such repeti-
tion produces a radical difference, a difference that is itself an expression
of the cross purpose described above. An echo of the name of a different
beloved, namely Wilhelm, issues from the space to which Werther always
returns and which marks his return to the order of the law. The aural or
the acoustical is thus an expression of difference with respect to the spa-
tial. The peculiarity of this site, however, does not end here. It depends as
well upon Werther always already having vacated that space over and over
again. This also means that the amorous encounter between Werther and
Wilhelm never occurs; it is merely an echo of something that was over
before it began but is still there as an echo. As such, the echo may remain
outside the order of the law. At the very least, the tremulous quality of the
echo renders the borders of this space unstable. Finally, this “queer” echo is
only one of countless differences produced by an affirmation of the eternal
return of the same or the countless rehearsals of what from the beginning
 Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces 81

has been cross-purposes, but it is an absolute difference that Barthes will

affirm again and again.5 The question that lingers is how to perceive such
an echo, if the echo is to be beyond the reach of the law.

Affirmation of the Nietzschean Ass

The discrepancy between Barthes’s expressed intentions and the actions

of Werther’s editor is all the more striking given the preeminent position
Nietzsche occupies in Barthes’s text. To be sure, Nietzsche is not cited as
often as Werther or, for that matter, as often as Freud, Proust, or Gide. But
his presence in the text cannot be reduced to the fifteen moments in which
the reference is explicit. It is no overstatement to submit that he haunts
the entire text. Specifically, it is Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same that
Barthes seeks to affirm: “Exiled from all gregarity, the [lover’s discourse] has
no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation”
(Barthes 24). Werther’s ambiguous “No” to life becomes the “unreal” site of
an unequivocal “Yes” for Barthes, or, in the language of Deleuze, of a double
affirmation: “What I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm,
without repeating . . . I affirm the first encounter in its difference . . . I say
to the Other (old or new); Let us begin anew” (Barthes 24).6 Even more
revealing is the manner in which Barthes reads Nietzsche to reevaluate the
amorous subject’s suffering as a sign of strength and thus an overcoming of
the resentment brought on by rebuffs from the “Other.” “Can one, reversing
the evaluation, imagine a tragic view of love’s suffering, a tragic affirmation
of I-love-you? And if (amorous) love were put (put back) under the sign
of the Active?” (Barthes 152). To affirm the eternal return of the same is
to say “Yes” to all the failed and tragic loves of Werther. Before Lotte, we
should recall, there was Lenora, and as Barthes remarks, Lotte is a mere
pretext for Werther to identify himself with every lost lover: “I am the one
who has the same place I have” (Barthes 129). That is, what is (re)affirmed
is a structural operation whereby the tragic lover comes to affirm his fate
by occupying the position of every other tragic lover, and the taking up of
those positions is an active valuation of their shared fate, a promiscuous
reevaluation that occurs with every citation in Barthes’s text. The language
of tears is their tears (his interlocutors) are his tears.
Each section of Barthes’s text, insofar as the book refuses a hierarchi-
cal classification with a view to an end and insofar as the sections, which
Barthes calls figures at work, have no first or last figure (Barthes 8), affirms
82 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

ever anew Werther’s forsakenness and its unbearable intensity. Such inten-
sity, however, only arises because the arbitrary performance of the figures is
subjugated to what Barthes calls the arbitrary factors of nomination and the
alphabet (Barthes 8). Affirmation of the eternal return of the same depends
upon three things: a position always already being there to occupy, a lover
having also been there whom Barthes (re)cites, and the willingness of the
amorous subject to submit to a structural operation that casts him outside
of the order he both enables and disables with his leave-taking. Werther, in
other words, is there only soon not to be there so he can be there again.
The double affirmation that subtends Barthes’s text relies upon a subject
projecting himself in multiple personae for the purposes of denying himself
or for the purposes of projecting his own death. In this respect, he has
captured Goethe’s Werther dead on, who upon reading his duties confesses
to Wilhelm that he had predicted his fate from the start. Certainly, such
promiscuity echoes Nietzsche; resentment, once affirmed, leads to a second
affirmation as it reevaluates (i.e., embraces) the condition of any subject’s
oppression, and all return or any returning to the scene is called forth by
a desire to relive such unbearable intensity. Willing that return renders the
intensity bearable.
This subject, however, is not the Nietzschean overman but rather the
“Nietzschean ass”: “Like the Nietzschean ass, I say yes to everything in the
field of my love. I insist, reject all training, repeat the same actions; no
one can educate me—nor can I educate myself . . . I persist in a dutiful,
discreet, conformist delirium, tamed and banalized by literature” (Barthes
177). Beyond providing the first whiff of the queerness of Barthes’s text,
the Nietzschean ass demands that we rethink Barthes’s recitation of both
Werther and Nietzsche. To affirm the eternal return of the same involved
a reevaluation so radical that it is a “yes” to the dutiful Nietzschean ass,
who “banalized by literature” can only hope to kill himself over and over
again. That, sadly, was the fate of many of Werther’s most devoted readers,
who showed their solidarity with the hero by imitating his suicide, dress
and all. Werther’s invariable, self-willed path to suicide thus not only poses
the most radical challenge to any Nietzschean affirmation of the same, but
it also affirms precisely that which Nietzsche was seeking to overcome. It
would be an error to dismiss Barthes’s reading of Nietzsche via Werther as
a deconstruction to expose the ass behind the overman. That would dis-
able the undeniable intent of the discourse to affirm, however, exiguous,
the site of such a discourse (1). At the very least, we can concede that the
exiguous character of the site points to a difference, or what I have called
 Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces 83

a rift, inherent in that exiguous site, which such a deconstruction exposes

without permitting the coordinates of that site to be fixed. If such coordi-
nates are as displaced as the temporal ones discussed in the introduction,
Werther’s self-described “pilgrimage” (Bathes 90) acquires a potentiality to
be and not to be by abandoning any measure of those dimensions.7 The
site or destination of the discourse could just as easily be marked by the
same “X” that is the name Barthes assigns to the beloved.
Barthes’s peculiar affirmation of love’s failure (Barthes 103) necessi-
tates a consideration of how desire is channeled in Werther. As we will see,
Werther offers a map of how desire’s plenitude—its plugging into everyone
and everything—is equally a lack, subject to the patriarchal controls that
psychoanalysis will come to reify according to fears of castration. There is
no need, however, to employ a Freudian vocabulary. Freudian psychoanalysis
simply marks the moment, as Guy Hocquenghem reminds us, when desire as
lack and the laws governing the object, the choice of which is to compensate
for that lack, are codified. Such laws establish a hierarchy of relationships,
whereby every subject is derived from filiation.8 That is, the family portrait
that so enamors Werther is possible only insofar as paternity is unquestioned,
which it certainly is not for Werther, whose father is simply not around.
As desire is mapped onto the body according to the laws of castration or
according to who has it and who does not, relations of property are likewise
constituted, giving rise to the kinds of class conflicts to which Werther is
not immune.9 If such an improbable economy of desire is at play here (its
abundance signals its lack), then the very controls Barthes seeks to elide are
(re)-instated the moment they are suspended. The “Great Narrative Other”
is not just the editor but the father and his law as well. The doubling of
the affirmation of the eternal return of the same affirms a dual character
of desire; it is both codified and incorrigible (e.g., the Nietzschean ass).
What was alluded to above as cross-purposes is, if this character of desire
holds, the impossibly divided essence of amorous desire. At the very least,
it is the ineluctable fate of an ass’ desire once it is doubly affirmed. To
understand this dual essence, it is important to examine how the father’s
absence increases his allure and structures the trajectory of Werther’s desire.

Werther’s Eternal Return

If Werther’s letters enflame his passion, such inflammation almost always

occurs under the watch or imagined presence of Wilhelm, who may offer
84 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

a compassionate face to the law but nevertheless is strictly bound to its

logic of either/or. “Either you have hope with Lotte or you have none.”
(“Entweder, sagst du [Wilhelm], hast du Hoffnung auf Lotten, oder du
hast keine”; Goethe 43). That is, either you have it or you don’t. Since
Werther’s passions are always tied to the scene of writing in which Wilhelm,
the addressee, is present in his absence, Werther’s apparent transgression
seems staged only to recall the father or a representative of his order. In the
letter of November 30, shortly before his suicide, Werther makes explicit
that the third who had always haunted the scene of passion is the father:
“Father, whom I do not know, who has otherwise filled my entire soul
and now would turn his face from me” (Goethe 91). The world opened
up by his famous turning inward—“I turn inward and discover a world.”
(“Ich kehre in mich zurück und finde eine Welt”)—is thus occupied by the
father, no less securely than the estate of the Swiss Family Frankenstein.
Such turning inward, in fact, furnishes the father with a space to haunt.
In this world, moreover, the father is the only hope, “. . . Only where
you are am I well, and before your countenance I will suffer and rejoice”
(Goethe 91). Barthes’s affirmation of an endless replay of Werther’s fate thus
might be nothing more than a concession and celebration of the father’s
will to power. But if such inversions signal an endless return to the father,
they also introduce the possibility that the role of the father will change.
At the very least, he calls upon surrogates such as Albert, Wilhelm, or an
editor to enforce the law. Then to whom else can Werther turn once the
father has turned away?
In the same letter there are, in fact, indications that the father is in
an awkward position. In the quotation above, Werther could be said to
apostrophize himself. He identifies with a madman, who had also loved
Lotte and who was never happier than when he was “outside of himself ”
(Goethe 90). Werther addresses him as though he were addressing himself
or even Frankenstein’s monster, “Wretched One” (“Elender”; Goethe 90).
The identification, however, is not complete. Werther distances himself from
the madman, who can find solace in attributing his misery to earthly causes.
Werther, by contrast, must look to the heavens for such solace. From within
what is supposed to be a site of interiority, the distance from the father proves
too great or too real and thus not simply an interior space. The father in
his omnipresent absence becomes increasingly fetching. By ending his self-
described pilgrimage (Goethe 90), Werther hopes to lock embraces with the
father: “Don’t be angry that I end my pilgrimage, which according to your
plan I should have endured longer” (Goethe 90). The questions that follows
 Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces 85

is: What happens to the law when the son comes face to face with the father,
when immediacy, heretofore conjoined by a third, only means being in the
father’s face? In other words, what does it mean when Werther proclaims,
in anticipation of Barthes’s affirmation of the eternal return, “Father, I am
here/there again” (“Ich bin wieder da, mein Vater!”; Goethe 91)? On the
one hand, it has something to do with the leave-taking necessary to identify
with the madman, which is also signaled by the self-apostrophe embedded
in the letter just cited. On the other, such being outside of oneself only
confirms the need of the amorous subject to answer to the father, even an
absent one. Suspension of the law is fleeting at best.
Not surprisingly, Werther’s odd self-apostrophe is followed by a more
direct one of the heavenly father: “And you, Heavenly Father, would you
turn away from him?” (Goethe 91). Not only do these apostrophes con-
firm the one’s presence in the absence of the other; the father is there to
address, but only if Werther is not, only if he is about to take leave of
himself and commit suicide. (Note as well that Werther’s self-reference is
in the third person, ihn.) Werther’s unending displacement also threatens
to disable subject/object distinctions, save that the father or his surrogate
serves to re-locate that subject, Werther, by soliciting Werther’s increasingly
fervent appeals. For example, the first word of the letter written immedi-
ately thereafter is “Wilhelm,” followed by an explanation point. If being
in God’s face is an impossibility that demands that Werther turn to a sur-
rogate, Wilhelm, the explanation point indicates that desire is not vitiated
by such rejection but rather emphatically redirected. In fact, all parties
become potential receptacles of desire. The letter, as we know, is prompted
by Werther’s ambivalent identification with a madman, who is “outside of
himself ” (Goethe 89) or no longer himself. That means that intermediar-
ies also function as surrogates. Surrogates—and this reflects the difference
inherent in self-apostrophe—cannot contain the self; they call the self out
everywhere to the point that desire is so eccentrically charged that it does
not control or overcome difference via an intermediary, but rather finds in
every object of desire a substitute for itself. The surrogate offers the self a
new position to occupy but also vacate. “Ich bin wieder da, mein Vater!”
whereby the “there” is never a “here” or self-same (ital. added, Goethe 91).
The interior world to which Werther turns is turned inside out insofar as
Werther is always displaced.
The matter explains Barthes’s response to Gide, who was so tired of
Goethe’s here postponing his suicide that he himself “wanted to push him
into the grave” (Barthes 219). Barthes responds that the hero is “real”
86 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

because he is “created out of an absolutely projective substance in which

every amorous subject collects himself ” (Barthes 219). That is to say, Werther
projects himself or is projected everywhere, even in the presence of the
Heavenly Father, to find himself collected by the projected substance even
when it means becoming a representative of the order that seeks to restrict
such a projection. Barthes’s response thus requires modification; the hero is
potentially real, which may explain Barthes’s placement of the word “real”
in italics. As such, the question that must be taken up is already suggested
by Werther’s confession to the Heavenly Father that he is there again or
wieder da. Does being everywhere or such an ecstatic projection of oneself
confirm the omnipresence of the father and the law, or does it negotiate an
exiguous space, to recall Barthes, exiguous because the moment the father
looks for Werther he is already elsewhere?
Its temporal-spatial character escapes stable coordinates at the same
time it grounds the possibility of such stability by calling upon the father.
Is this what Werther means when he writes Albert that he hopes to steal
between the either/or of the father’s logic (“durchzustehlen,” Goethe 43)?
Is then every position in which the subject collects himself an “either’ that
forestalls any “or”? Of course, once the logic of either/or is reinstalled—and
Werther cannot help but ask for such reinstallment since his plea to the
father demands a “yes” or “no” response—the intensity that such forestall-
ing sponsors alters the relation to the father who is present as surrogate
in an interior space turned inside out. But if the intensity is so great that
Werther can radically reposition himself with respect to any other being,
can he really be killed off? His excesses allow him to take up positions as
promiscuously as Barthes’s citational practices do for the amorous subject.
Very possibly, this explains Barthes’s affirmation of the suicidal subject inso-
far as that subject is really never anywhere to kill himself. He has always
already taken off, something to which Werther alerts us in the very first
line of the first letter: “Wie froh bin ich, daß ich weg bin!” (“How happy
I am to be away:” Goethe 7).10

The Eternal Return of the Father

Initially, Werther’s disappearing act allows him to float freely on the margins
of the family portrait that so enthralls him upon first meeting Lotte. Such
disappearing is evident in the manner in which he identifies or occupies
 Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces 87

the position of his surroundings. “Every tree, every hedge is a bouquet

of flowers, and one would like to become a cockchafer in order to float
around in a sea of fragrances and find my nourishment there” (Goethe 8).
The self, which is never the same from one moment to the next, finds itself
everywhere, undergoing constant metamorphosis. So complete is Werther’s
immersion in his surroundings that he celebrates his own dissolution in
the glory of all that he beholds: “But I am overcome, and I submit to
the overpowering glory of these manifestations” (“Aber ich gehe darüber
zugrunde; ich erliege under der Gewalt der Herrlichkeit dieser Erscheinun-
gen”; Goethe 9). To be sure, such identifications are not always glorious,
since the trajectory of those identifications is tragic, and thus the figures
with whom he identifies are, as stated above, tragic lovers. But the intensity
that is found in identifying, for example, with a Bauernbursch is matched
by a delirious immersion in nature: “The overwhelming fullness makes me
feel like a god.” “My entire soul is moved and invigorated by such beautiful
figures” (“Ich fühlte mich in der überfließenden Fülle wie vergöttert, und
die herrlichen Gestalten der undenklichen Welt bewegten sich allbelebend
in meiner Seele”; Goethe 51). Interiority, Innigkeit, does not prohibit entry
of/into the world but rather fosters an intimacy whose sponsoring desire
seeks neither to possess any object nor to sequester itself in a closet of
unpronounced or unpronounceable objects. Two pronouncements the text
offers for this condition are übertrieben and überspannt (“exaggerated but
also in overdrive” and “overexcited or over-aroused”; Goethe 34, 47). Such
an extension does not permit the self, now in overdrive, to reconstruct a
narcissistic or cohesive image of itself, which explains why the passage in
which Werther bathes in divine plenitude ends with feelings of complete
destitution. The self is present only as premonition (“Ahnung,” Goethe 13)
or as dark, i.e., unpronounced, desire (“dunkler Begier,” Goethe 13). Barthes
draws on Plato to define such a condition as the atopia of love (Barthes
34), whereby the site of the amorous discourse is so exiguous that it defies
qualification or classification. It is only potentially a site.11
The object of desire refuses conformation to types, instead undergo-
ing constant metamorphosis in a mimetic economy that acknowledges no
natural boundaries. Werther can envy even the canary who gathers his food
from Lotte’s pursed lips (Goethe 79–80). The scene excites Werther’s pas-
sion to the point that he must turn away, fearful of his response. Such fear
is over-determined. To kiss Lotte is to kiss a lover forbidden him because
she is promised to another, Albert, and even if she were to succumb to
88 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

Werther’s advances, the flightiness of such desire is just as likely to invite

advance from a canary as it is from Werther. None of this speaks to the
most remarkable aspect of the scene that includes Werther as it excludes
him; he also exchanges a kiss with the canary. That is, the canary is both
subject and object of desire. That renders Werther’s reaction—turning his
face away or turning the other cheek as the canary feeds from the mouth
of Lotte—disingenuous. For love’s atopia that forever displaces the lover and
the beloved means that every turning repositions one in a new economy of
desire. The radical transformation such repositioning poses cannot be over-
stated; one moment Werther is wooing Lotte only in the next to play Lotte
the coquette, as he weaves a bouquet of flowers during a walk with Albert
(Goethe 44). He can fancy himself as Melusine with her sisters (Goethe 9) or
find Wilhelm just as worthy a recipient of his rapturous tears. But Wilhelm
is available only insofar as he is unavailable: “O, that I not throw myself at
him” (“daß ich [Werther] nicht an deinen Hals fliegen . . .” Goethe 56).
The letters that incite passion by rehearsing passion depend upon a dual
leave-taking: the subject from the object and the object from the subject.
Whether the object be Lotte or Wilhelm or Albert or Melusine’s sisters and
the subject be Werther or the Bauernbursch or the madman or Melusine or
a canary, the result is the same. If a lover cannot find himself, it is unlikely
the beloved can find him, too.
Such a condition has been described as a narcissistic plentitude, whereby
the self finds itself everywhere, positioned alongside or as a part of everything
it contacts only to not recognize itself as a self since it has no psychology.12
Werther, as well, understood himself to be scattered, but he depends upon
being buffeted about for oxygen: “The light and darkness of my soul are
dispersed, and I can breathe again” (Goethe 39). Later, Werther will lament
that such distraction is suffocating (Goethe 75). Since breathing is at cross-
purposes with itself; desire, not surprisingly, is as well. The aberrant course
of his soul might foreclose composition of a psychology, but it opens up the
possibility that Werther’s desire as well as his core being are errant. How such
a core being, or if you will a psychology, comes to be cannot be attributed
simply to a turning inward. Without a space already demarcated as the
habitat of the soul, such turning would only expose Werther’s backside as
he repeatedly takes to leaving.13 The pressure on Werther to collect himself
issues not so much from a heartfelt interest to save Werther from himself
but more from a need to situate him within the bounds of class and family
so as to prevent the obscene exposure of his backside. The Nietzschean ass
 Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces 89

is more threatening than the overman, save that Werther, even in his most
ecstatic moments is already beholden to the father: “Nothing fills me with
such peaceful, true feeling as the signs of patriarchal life that I, thank God,
can weave into my life without affectation” (Goethe 29).
If Werther is incorrigible, i.e., if he refuses his station, that does not
mean he cannot serve to reinforce the family portrait he threatens.14 Clinging
to the fringe, he also demarcates its boundaries in much the same way his
grave is positioned to the cemetery: “I will not ask pious Christians that
their bodies should be laid next to mine. Oh, I ask that you bury me along
the road or in a lovely valley” (Goethe 123). Even before the editor will
arrive on the scene to scrutinize every scrap of paper left by Werther and
lend order to the life of one who was not of the “common stamp” (93),
Werther has already been recruited to delimit and thus preserve the social
order that could not countenance his backside.

Were I not such a fool, I could lead the best and happiest life.
Barely do such favorable circumstances come together to delight
the soul of a man as those that I find myself in now. Oh, just
as certain is that our heart alone creates happiness. Oh, to be
a member (“Glied”) of a family so worthy of love, to be loved
by all as a son, by the children like a father, and from Lotte!
(45; ital. added)

Werther, judged by this passage, is already lacking what it takes to be a

member of the happy family. He is only a part of such bliss by dint of
simile: “like a son,” “like a father.” When some form of immediacy is pur-
sued, as it is with Lotte, he is immediately displaced by a third. The passage
continues, “then the upstanding Albert . . . who, after Lotte, is the loveli-
est person on earth” (Goethe 44). In the first meeting between Lotte and
Werther, the word or name “Klopstock” prevented their lips from meeting,
indicating that intimacy or Innigkeit always depended upon a third. Here,
the triangle is reconfigured to preserve the family portrait. Albert can love
Werther, almost as much as Lotte, for he knows that Werther assures Albert’s
position in relation to Lotte. Somehow the plugging-in of everyone and
everything of Werther’s desire has succumbed to a calculus that secures the
social structures that might otherwise be threatened by one who is übers-
pannt and übertrieben. Striking is how the plenitude of Werther’s desire is
unthinkable without the presence of the father, i.e., without the threat of
90 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

castration that restructures such plenitude as lack and impregnates desire

with a need to reclaim the lost member (Glied).
Since the narrative that the editor presents to explain Werther’s
strange ways charts a clear progression from bliss to desperation, it offers a
documented pathology of his sickness unto death for purposes of securing
the family structure. The editor’s detective work is exhaustive: “I have been
at great pains to collect precise testimonies from the mouths of those who
could have known much about his story. And all of their accounts, apart
from a few minor details, are in agreement with each other” (Goethe 92).
These are not just any witnesses; but ones who have been well instructed
(unterrichtet) by Werther’s story; that is, once it is a story, Werther’s life has
the potential to be as instructive as a moral tale. Something must be at stake
for the editor to carry out such a thorough investigation that he describes as
gewissenhaft, signaling the convergence of knowledge and morality (Goethe
93).15 Even bits of paper are subject to scrutiny (Goethe 7), and if Werther’s
life seemed to go nowhere by his being everywhere, the editor’s linear nar-
rative takes Werther straight to the grave. His end, announced already in
the editor’s preliminary remarks (Goethe 7), provides the narrator with the
necessary omniscience to judge and perhaps condemn, save that Werther has
condemned himself already. Instead, the narrator—whose authority signals
precisely the interventions Barthes decried when he refused the “Great Nar-
rative Other”—offers pity as a salve for the force of the (narrative) law he
imposes. “You cannot but offer his mind and character your admiration;
his fate, your tears” (Goethe 7).16 The condemned man can be pitied when
his fate is evident from the outset. He can also be pitied because his soul
was afflicted; a diseased desire had taken hold of him and affected even his
way of thinking (Sinnesart; Goethe 98). But the self that was to become the
beneficiary of such benevolence is there only as a posthumous construction.
It was the progression of Werther’s disease, his sickness unto death, that
called forth the absolute voice of narrative reason. The Nietzschean ass that
Barthes affirms in Werther is thus one whose perversity always summons a
voice to pity the absent Werther and to name the pathogen and immunize
others against it. “And you, good soul, who are feeling the same anguish
as Werther, let this small book be your friend, should fate or guilt prevent
you from finding another one” (Goethe 98). According to the logic of the
eternal return of the same, it is impossible to speak of a time before the law,
before guilt.17 The temporal disjunction remarked upon in the introduction
in Werther’s letter to Lotte is repeated here: the wayward Werther is before
the law only because he is constructed after the law. This posthumous con-
struction comes to re-mark Werther’s errant ways as queer.18
 Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces 91

The Eternal Return of the Queer

As Barthes notes, two economies are opposed and seemingly at cross pur-
poses with each other: “[. . .] there is the lover Werther who expends his
love every day, without any sense of saving or of compensation, and on the
other, there is the husband Albert, who economizes his goods, his happi-
ness” (Barthes 65). Barthes names the confluence of the two a simultaneous
proffering that is possible only in a “single flash” that refuses the time neces-
sary to draw up an agreement (Barthes 80). That is not to say a lover and
a husband are offered simultaneously. Barthes is imagining the possibility
whereby lover and beloved utter the words “I love you” simultaneously; as
such, no thought of repletion can exist. How can one husband resources if
the return, in the form of a response, is simultaneous with the expenditure?
The “I” is already elsewhere, unable to receive the proffer. Writing places
the subject elsewhere, particularly when the self is a letter-writer who is
constructed as something to be sent or posted. But the letter or the vow
can never arrive, since it has already been returned as a simultaneous proffer-
ing from one who has also left his/her place and sent the return to a place
from which the other has already departed. Thus, there arises the need for
a placeholder: a Klopstock to seal the first kiss between Werther and Lotte
by coming in between them, a husband whom Werther often loves with
as much fervor as he does Lotte, or a gravesite to guarantee a final return
on incalculable expenditure.
Such placeholders render simultaneous proffering impossible. Recip-
rocation is delayed, and it always misses the mark. Werther’s impertinent
kiss of Lotte right before his death may indicate that this economy has
been thwarted, since he spends the next hours virtually unconscious, but
the kiss is retuned only later and not by Lotte. Rather, the eldest son of
the old steward does so as he passes Werther’s casket. His passion matches
Werther’s; he must be dragged away by force as Werther expires (Goethe
124). The son’s kiss is a kiss of death, except that the kiss Werther imper-
tinently placed on Lotte’s lips the night before was just such a kiss as well.
Not surprisingly, Albert, unlike the steward’s son, does not follow the body,
as he apparently needed to tend to Lotte for whom a fear for her life had
been expressed. The kiss of death is a potential pathogen and contagion (see
Barthes 136) whereby its spread and containment is regulated by this odd
economy of impossible desires. That is to say, the impossibility of a simul-
taneous proffering summons a third who intercepts the kiss and isolates its
pathogen but who, in being turned away, kisses another to summon once
again an interloper. As we have seen, such interlopers are as numerous as
92 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

the Werthers that are in play here, ranging from Klopstock to a canary.
“This ‘affective contagion’ . . . proceeds from others, from language, from
books, from friends; no love is original” (Barthes 136).
If the subject is not there to locate or to offer an account of his
whereabouts, the structural operation discussed above already has assigned the
subject his place, which he will also, paradoxically, already have returned to
or, as we have seen throughout this essay, been returned to. But the disavowal
of the beloved, necessitated by countless interlopers and indicated as well
by Barthes’s “X,” creates its own site, however exiguous and fleeting, that
at least momentarily, in the time perhaps of echo, secures an experience of
love outside of this economy. In other words, the tension of this paradox,
particularly as it pertains to Werther’s whereabouts, retains the possibility
that a series of repeated disavowals of the amorous subject will occasion
a different rhythm that escapes or steals through the logic of either/or: a
logic that marks desire as either plentitude or lack and according to which
Werther either submits to the law or he becomes an outlaw only to be
subjected again to the law. Such a love might be “original.” That possibility,
to repeat, resides in a temporal disjunction, which is captured by Barthes
when he insists that the primal scene of love has always already occurred,
just as Werther’s with Lenore had before his story with Lotte began. It is
pretextual and spoken in the past tense. Thus, Barthes can confidently assert
that the scenes Werther relates always have the vocation of a remembrance
(Barthes 217). That is not to say the scenes are merely memories, but rather
the scenes are intended from the beginning, even before the beginning,
to be lost in the past. “The imperfect tense murmurs behind the present”
(Barthes 127).
Such murmuring is evident in an episode Barthes reports in “Soirees
de Paris.” The episode concerns the calculated rejection of Barthes by a
hustler. The calculation is in the form of a payment in advance. “I gave
him some money, he promised to be at the rendezvous an hour later, and
of course never showed” (Barthes 51).19 Initially, the calculation seems to
be a simple one: sex in return for a fixed sum of money. Of course, it is
no sex for money. The manner in which this complicates the calculation
is understood by Barthes as follows: “I asked myself if I was really so mis-
taken (the received wisdom about giving money to a hustler in advance!),
and concluded that since I didn’t really want him all that much (nor even
to make love), the result was the same: sex or no sex, at eight o’clock I
would find myself back at the same point in my life.”20 Going against
received wisdom and paying in advance is the thing one does who knows
 Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces 93

he will end up at the same point in his life no matter what he does. The
either/or that Werther would like to stealthily make his war in-between is
rejected here as well. “Either I will have sex or I will not have sex”: both
options are put in play by the calculation of miscalculation, but it is also
clear that disavowal does not fully break with what it disavows. After all,
the one who disavows returns to that place, but the difference inherent in
that return always appears to have been accounted for in advance. If an echo
of something absolutely different is to become audible, it will be necessary
to think not only what such a disavowal means but also what it means to
have staged it in advance. That requires examining how Werther, and thus
Barthes’s amorous subject, come to be encoded as queer. And even if such
encoding merely rehearses once again the rhythm of a return to the father
or the order of his law, Barthes’s (mis)calculation echoes of a potentiality
that never fully registers. It does so by preserving a saying “Yes” to Werther’s
undeniable “No” or by disavowing the beloved in advance, a disavowal that
is possible only because of what I have called a temporal disjunction that
underwrites the return to that place.
Nietzsche offers a framework for understanding this queer echo in his
discussion of the sentimental. The sentimental for Nietzsche is the patho-
logical, the total aberration of the instincts that turns one onto Wagner,
who composes “one piece of anti-nature that downright compels a second”
(“Eine Wideratur erzwingt formlich eine zweite.”).21 The condemnation of
the sentimental is even more emphatic in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “O, you
sentimental hypocrites, you covetous ones lack the innocence of desire, and
now you slander desire.”22 Thus, the anti-nature that compels a second (to
do what?) becomes the motor of resentment, a second sentimentalizing that
defiles all desire and eventually leads Nietzsche to speak of Wagner’s “incred-
ibly pathological sexuality” that necessitates putting gloves on “when reading
the score of Tristan” (“. . . im Banne seiner unglaubwürdigen krankhaften
Sexualität; ich ziehe die Handschuhe an, wenn, ich die Partitur des Tristan
lese”).23 If Barthes affirms the sentimental to disable any pathology, its repeti-
tion, according to Nietzsche, merely describes how inveterate aberrant desire
is. Nietzsche should know, since his repulsion of Wagner is always at cross
purposes with his love of Wagner, a love that is enduring enough for him
to insist that his own name is interchangeable with Wagner’s.24 But to what
extent does unnatural desire attach to the figure, Werther, insofar as Goethe’s
text is composed at a time when terms such as inversion and homosexuality
have no ontological status?25 The unnatural or sodomitical act—and Barthes
identifies the beloved, almost without exception, as male—did not extend
94 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

to the person; such acts were not part of a psychological substratum that
organized the psyche and the self. His editor knows only that such passion
is strange, wunderbar, and leaves one fatigued and world-weary (Goethe
100), something that no doubt accounts for Nietzsche’s disdain. Werther’s
effusive displays of emotions are thus merely effects, save that they will
always only be charged with significance.26
Citing a cluster of such effects indicates how queerness or aberrant
desire serves as a crucible for encoding and decoding them: His dandified
dress that inspired a fashion craze, the comical manner in which his mimetic
desire finds him strolling with Albert as he plays the role of a florist weav-
ing his companion a bouquet; Lotte’s ribbon, which he famously preserves,
and while not in the shape of a triangle, is certainly pink; the ease with
which Wilhelm or writing to Wilhelm enflames his passion, which leads to
apostrophes such as “Ach Lieber,” “Mein Lieber,” “Mein Schatz” (“O dear,”
“My dear,” “My sweetheart; e.g., Goethe 17. 63, 75, 98).27 In fact, this
potential superseding of Lotte by Wilhelm is telling in the letter of July
26 in which he asks Lotte directly not to put sand on the notes she sends
him as the sand causes distress when he kisses her notes. The addressee of
the letter, however, is arguably uncertain or displaced.28 Such confusion is
telling in that he may kiss the wrong notes or seal the ones addressed to
Wilhelm with a kiss if such letters, as this one, recall her presence to the
point of embodiment. Anyone who professes that it is better to see his
beloved through the eyes of another—and Werther confesses a need to
see the widow through the eyes of the Bauernbursch (Goethe 18)—always
comes dangerously close to desiring the one whose desire he desires. Or as
Barthes writes, “Show me whom to desire” (Barthes 136), which is precisely
what the women in the carriage do for Werther as they describe Lotte in
advance of his meeting her.
How such queering accommodates the logic of the “Great Narrative
Other” is particularly evident in the first installment of the prequel to Die
Leiden des jungen Werther, Briefe aus der Schweiz, although it was written
much later in 1803. Here, the young Werther is captivated by the sight of
his friend Ferdinand’s impressive physique, “I made it necessary for Ferdi-
nand to bathe in the sea. How beautifully my young friend is built. What
symmetry and measure! What fullness of form! what a youthful glow! what
a gain for me to have my imagination enriched by such a complete exem-
plar of human nature.” This is hardly the same family portrait that ignited
Werther’s love for Lotte, but the emotional charge is unmistakable. So eas-
ily does it resonate with Werther’s later letters to Wilhelm that one could
 Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces 95

question what or whom Werther actually saw in Lotte. To what extent did
his imagination, so enlivened by the sight of the naked male form whom
he solicited to disrobe, find an equal conformation or measure of beauty in
Lotte? Did Wilhelm ever offer the same spectacle so that in writing about
Lotte to Wilhelm Werther could draw upon his friend’s naked splendor
to inspire his love for Lotte? That Werther cannot bring a silhouette of
Lotte to paper suggests that her form was not as generous in endowing the
imagination with gifts as was Ferdinand’s. But the diligence he displays in
attempting to bring Lotte to paper is not lacking in Die Briefe. Werther
tries to set things straight by viewing a naked woman, since the absence
of Venus renders the scene incomplete: “. . . She was quite fetching as
she disrobed, already beautiful as the last garment fell away. She stood as
Minerva might have stood before Paris.”29 The erotic charge of the scene,
nonetheless, lacks the immediacy of the former. Venus’s or Minerva’s desire
is routed through the desire of another, although Paris is certainly a more
seductive third than Klopstock. If her charm arouses desire, it does so by
positioning Werther as the voyeur watching Paris watch Minerva. This
tortuous route to heterosexuality, if the younger Werther’s Swiss Bildung
is to train the eye to look through the eyes of another (which Werther of
The Sorrows does), is to trace the fabulous outline of the male nude before
assuming a position that opens up to the spectacle of the female form.30
Male same-sex attraction may be, as Robert Tobin has argued, a phase
for Goethe that one outgrows,31 but since the prequel is written after The
Sorrows, male same-sex attraction is always something one potentially returns
to. In any case, the most Werther seems prepared to accomplish is to make
of his servant a Paris: “Today, I couldn’t go to see Lotte. I sent my servant
instead so as to have someone around me who had been in her presence
today. How impatiently I waited for him! How gladly I would have taken
his head and kissed it, were I not afraid of embarrassing myself ” (Goethe
39). Less interesting is whether Werther will succumb to kissing a servant.
More important is how such a triangulation of desire produces shame, but
also conflates a surfeit of desire with lack and absence. Recall how Werther
wants to kiss Lotte as she plays the piano and sings, only to reproach himself
afterwards for his sins (87). But what are his sins? This letter to Wilhelm
is replete with dashes or Gedankenstrichen, a practice Werther cursed in a
recent post but found unable to resist. His lips, neither pursed for a kiss
nor labile enough to articulate, albeit metonymically, desire, mark a site of
emptiness and lack. The Swiss prequel already offered knowledge of what
Werther’s sickness unto death was. Without the naked Ferdinand his lips
96 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

merely suck air. When he finally is able to kiss Lotte, the pharmakon only
releases its toxins; he kills himself thereafter, the most emphatic statement
of his absence.
For Barthes such postscripting of desire has already occurred, which
leads him to lament, “I am an amputee who still feels pain in his missing
leg” (Barthes 39). Barthes experiences Werther’s castration as Nachträglichkeit.
Or rather, he experiences Werther’s absenting of himself from the family
portrait as castration: “Grant me only a little peace, and everything will
be settled,” Werther says to Charlotte in a plaintive yet threatening tone.
Which is to say, “You will soon be rid of me” (as cited, Barthes 208). For
Barthes, Werther becomes the pain associated with a missing appendage so
insistent that only an affirmation of that pain might offer relief. The affirma-
tion requires nothing less than a second, given how Werther’s threat fails to
achieve its purpose, which, according to Barthes, is to have the last word.
Werther’s redactor usurps that word and offers a frame for understanding
Werther’s effects. Moreover, the effects come to acquire a name precisely
because they lack one, not unlike Schlemihl or the schlemiel. The love that
does not speak its name does so precisely by being a cluster of scattered
effects. Or as D. A. Miller writes, “It overperforms by not performing as
itself,” and the polymorphous self is never itself.32 If Barthes looks to Werther
to discover the possibility that such love could refuse nomination—and it is
worth recalling yet again that the amorous subject is denoted not by name
but by an “X” in Barthes’s text—“the name in question is that name, whose
diffuse prejudicial effects depend on its not being pronounced, on its being
restricted, quasi catachrestically, to a system of connotation (Miller, Barthes
25). Barthes’s affirmation of the sentimental, his resentimentalizing of Werther
as the modern amorous subject, cannot rescue him from the vicious circle,
to reapply Pierre Klossowski’s by now canonical description of the eternal
return of the same. “In fact, it leaves him all the more destitute for resisting
them,” (Miller, Barthes, 25) which, in turn, necessitates a second affirma-
tion that only reconscripts Werther in a system of connotation. Nostalgia
obtains as loss for the possibility that an affirmation of a moment in which
sexuality, lacking any ontological status, could steal between the logic of an
either/or, only to discover that a second affirmation is always already part
of a hetero/homo calculation.
To escape this order requires refining Barthes’s expressed intention
of affirming difference a second time. That is to say, an affirmation of the
disavowal of an affirmation—and we should think here of Barthes’s mis-
calculation—affirms a potentiality that neither is nor is not, provided it is
 Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces 97

never fully articulated or echoes from a site so exiguous it defies nomination.

Replaying the timelines critical to this essay will render the echo audible
since the echo is constructed via repetition.33

Messianic Echoes and the Eternal Return of the Queer

The queering of Werther’s desire is based upon retrospective knowledge,

even if Barthes hears echoes of something not structured by the law that
governs such knowledge. This is because Werther’s editor, as we know,
reconstructs the narrative with a purpose and because Werther’s letters are
both separate from and intimately bound to the events described. As a
citation of the feelings and events in question, they interrupt the economy
that has made of him the hysterical outsider who will always only come
to be read as queer, but the letters also remain the primary vehicle for the
“Great Narrative Other” to weave a moral lesson from his case study of
Werther. Barthes’s citations of Werther, or his practices of citation, confirm
or replay this odd dialectic; they wrest the original from a context that has
already been ordered according to the economic constraints of the editor
and in response to the need to pathologize Werther, but the citations also
confirm Werther’s role in that economy. Nietzsche’s eternal return of the
same serves as a means to affirm and preserve the tension that results from
endlessly re-citing Werther. But the uncertainly, the suspension of meaning
such re-citing should mark, acquires meaning in a queer context or when
knowledge is preterited.34 The sentimental amorous subject is named and
type-cast precisely because he is nothing but citations, as the reference above
to D. A. Miller indicate. Barthes’s insertion of Werther into the Nietzschean
scene of affirmation demonstrates how the entire unfolding of heterosexual
normativity is knotted around the absence of one who will become but always
only has been queer. The Nietzschean occlusion of the sentimental enables
a developmental logic from sickness to health, or from same-sex attraction
to so-called opposite sex attraction. Here, it is helpful to recall the young
Werther’s attraction and deification of Ferdinand in Goethe’s Briefe aus der
Schweiz, an attraction the Werther of the Sorrows has outgrown.35 Barthes’s
interruption of that development eventually succumbs to that logic—insert-
ing Werther in the economy the amorous subject sought to evade—but it
simultaneously, and thus paradoxically, undoes any teleology of sexuality
that charts nonaberrant desire as moving through and between same-sex
attraction. The repetition of that rupture, its silence, is what echoes. But we
98 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

are not finished yet. The question that remains is whether the preservation
of both of these moves or possibilities is a double affirmation that affirms
both an “either” and an “or.” The answer lies in reexamining the specifics
of how Werther’s “No” to life rewrites the terms of such an affirmation.
The affirmation of Barthes’s amorous subject and of Werther’s tragic
fate fails because Werther is always already recuperated posthumously by a
“Great Narrative Other” that strings together and renders legible the dif-
fuse cluster of his traits: “I am being played like a marionette,” Werther
laments (Goethe 65). If as a result of that recuperation the amorous subject
is always viewed as lacking, as an “amputee who still feels pain in his miss-
ing leg” (Barthes 39), a disjunctive temporality is just as likely the source of
that pain. “Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense, it might
be called an anterior immediacy . . . distinct, framed, it is already (always
again) a memory” (Barthes 194). This then is the difference that is doubly
or endlessly affirmed, that was rehearsed with the memory of a rendezvous
with a hustler that never occurred. The interminable taking-leave from the
scene of the amorous encounter, which has always already occurred by the
time Werther writes his letters, may, in one of its endless rehearsals, repo-
sition the amorous subject outside the “Great Narrative Other’s” panoptic
field of registration. He may come to occupy a space so exiguous, assuming
positions inevitably at cross-purposes with each other, that his presence will
echo from no identifiable source, his lack of identity disabling nomination.
At best, nomination becomes a barely audible echo. While the memory of
that which didn’t happen may, as Barthes claims, be framed, the edges of
that frame, the margins where the amorous subject resides, tremble, since the
love that offered memory its frame was dissolving before it even occurred.
This also means that the beloved, “X,” is a “supplement of his own site”
(Barthes 221), placing him and the amorous subject at the limits of language
where nothing can be pronounced. Think only of Werther’s need for dashes
or “Gedanken-striche.”36
But what does it mean to be at the limits of language? “Love falls
outside of interesting time. No historical or polemical meaning can be given
to it. It is in this sense obscene” (Barthes 178–79). If the future anterior, as
the explicit undertone of the lover’s discourse, is to exceed the calculations
of interesting time, that promise registers polemically. “I will have been”
does anything but deflect scrutiny from its subject. It nominates one for
homosexuality. The imaginary, coherent body of such reverberations—to
rephrase Barthes—indicates, at the same time, that memory of the event
precedes the event. What is therefore required is an adjustment to the future
 Queer Echoes Traversing Great Spaces 99

perfect that disables or rather destabilizes the frame of the future anterior
from the start, from before the beginning, the frame that Barthes describes
as, “The impossible moment when the obscene can really coincide with
affirmation, with the ‘Amen’ ” (Barthes 179). Affirmation must maintain its
impossible character, the impossibility of which constitutes its obscenity. This
temporal adjustment thus requires re-casting the contractual impossibilities
of paying a hustler in advance. The transaction itself is not obscene insofar
as it occurs on the street or inside the café to which Barthes, sex or no
sex, will return. What is to take place is obscene, if it takes place, but it
does not. “I will have made love” or “I will have loved” becomes “I will
already not have made love” or “I will already not have loved.” But it could
just as easily be, “I will already not have not loved.”37 The last formulation
signals a double affirmation of Werther’s “No” to life. The double negative
does not convert into a positive, but rather it preserves the possibility for
love to be and not to be, to restore, in other words, its potentiality. For
Barthes’s amorous subject, “I will not already not have loved” means that
“X” is there in never being there as well as never having been there. For
Werther, the only one who is there only insofar as he is never articulated
as such, only insofar as his absence echoes throughout the text, and only
insofar as a queer echo, like the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph,
could have been articulated but was not, is . . . Wilhelm.38
 5

“I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.”

Echoes of a Queer Messianic in Brokeback Mountain

The final chapter is more of a coda. The messianic promise embedded in

the film’s melancholia finds it cues in the past, something that is repeatedly
emphasized by the film’s penchant for rearview images. That is not to say
that the texts considered in chapters 1 through 4 reverberate conspicuously
or consistently throughout Brokeback Mountain, but rather those texts
prepare a terrain that moves in a different direction from the politics of
normalcy. The first two chapters, as we might recall, looked to understand
how family values as well as dreams of endogamy and nation contributed
to the eventual creation of the male homosexual as a type, easily contained
and identified within the sights of the panoptic regime. While Frankenstein
makes a mess of sexuality, its energies pull in two distinct directions—
toward restoration of the Swiss Family through preservation of endogamy
and toward a self that goes outside of itself and thus de-constitutes itself.
Peter Schlemihl’s wondrous history points to construction of an apparatus
to link the Jew and the queer to solidify the outsider status of the “almost”
emancipated Jew and to sequester the queer in a closet of his own “Jew-
ish” making. At the same time, something escapes confinement, call it an
avatar, that augurs of a sexual terrorism that still haunt the margins of the
world from which Schlemihl was exiled. Kleist’s “On the Puppet Theater”
looked at how the text came over time to invite a queer reading only to
reject such a disclosure in favor of disabling any interpretive gestures that
could link sexual acts with sexuality or character traits. In other words, the
text pulls, as did Frankenstein, in two directions. Roland Barthes’s reading of

101
102 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

Werther reawakens the messianic echoes of Goethe’s text. Through citation

and repetition his reading comes to create a counter rhythm that preserves
love of different kind.
While it is the purpose of this chapter to fill out the possibilities
adumbrated in the previous one, the echoes pursued in this chapter fol-
low a different rhythm or configuration. Repetition in this case actually
reduplicates construction of a closet or, to recall Schlemihl, a cabinet. But
this constant return to an inside, and even an inside of an inside, strains
the limits of interiority until something collapses or just breaks and a new
horizon of possibility is espied. We might recall from the introduction the
dizzying and ultimately unreadable course of inversion in Proust’s Sodom
and Gemorrah. The reading of the film offered here is actually a collage of
sorts that relies on the short story and the screenplay as well. If the previous
chapters sought to collect traces of a forgotten or discarded aspect of the
texts, the decision to piece together a reading from all three sources follows
that strategy. From the beginning, the fundamental wager of this project has
been that earlier texts would open onto possibilities for queer readings that
translate into surprising but politically productive indices for jumpstarting
gay history along a different axis from its current one. Understood as well
is that they would be disseminated unevenly. As before, the echoes do not
articulate an actualization of a potentiality once heard and now recalled but
rather ones whose fragmentary and at times disjointed character preserves a
possibility beyond the regimens of the biopolitical. That is, the barely audible
announces something in excess of bare life, resistant to the management of
the homosexual as a species.

Jumpstarting Gay History

The image on the back of an early copy of the DVD of the movies expresses
the predicament, as it were, of gay politics in the neoliberal age. There are
four images. At the left margin is Ennis Del Mar; at the right margin is
Jack Twist. Center left are Ennis and his wife; center right, Jack and his
wife. In other words, gravity pulls even queers to a center occupied by
heterosexual unions. What such symmetry means is that gay relationships
or love stories are over before they begin; always seen through a rear view
mirror; their rear end always in sight before anything begins.1 While critics
may have argued how easily the film’s gayness translated into stories befit-
ting straight people, the real question might be if the film is even a love
 “I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” 103

story.2 Do a “couple of high-altitude fucks once or twice a year,” as Jack

laments, constitute a love story? Or is it precisely a gay love story because
it never materializes? Half of the film follows the lovers as members of the
traditional family and their travails as heterosexuals. Almost every time we
see Jack and Ennis together, the following scene concerns life on the het-
erosexual home front where girlfriends, wives, children, and in-laws both
protect and threaten the closet. As the cover of the DVD indicated, the
film’s understanding of homosexuality appears to be pure inversion, standing
in reverse relationship to heterosexual marriage, which governs the center
and protects the essence of all sexuality.
To focus, as many early critics did, on the universal dimensions of
homosexuality obscures other issues such as class and race. Class is hardly
obscured in the film. Jack Twist, the one whose marriage jumpstarts his
social mobility, is ever ready to come out and set up house, thereby trian-
gulating class, coming out, and domestication. Ennis de Mar, on the other
hand, may live in a mobile home and move from job to job, but he goes
nowhere fast. Mobility, at least for him, is a fiction—as is his family name,
del Mar. He is “of the sea” or queer to mountain country, and apparently,
of Latino origin despite his porcelain skin. The sexual partners Jack finds on
the other side of the border in Mexico for backroom, anonymous adventure
are mere metonymies for the one Latino who remains forever removed by a
border of a different kind. But the love story, if there is one, is over before
it begins. Metonymous, anonymous sex fills the void. Moreover, such rear
viewing renders class and race inconsequential. Those antagonisms have
already been played out.
If the homosexual love story is over before it begins, as it were,
then the promise of coming out, the promise of going West to realize the
American kind of freedom is rather moot. Such blindness extends to the
film itself or at least to its obscured time line. The film begins in 1963 or
pre-Stonewall and ends in 1983 or at the beginning of the AIDS crisis.
Perhaps that explains why in the middle of Buttfuck, Wyoming, everyone
has homosexuality on his mind. In the period during which coming out is
essentially a gay narrative, the film, set in a part of American that seems to
promise so much physical space in which to come out, begs the question:
Just where does one come out to? To Brokeback Mountain, where “stem-
ming the rose,” as the ever vigilant sheep rancher Augirre describes it, is
already under his watchful eyes.3 To Mexico? Where backroom sex and
the specter of AIDS signal the fate of those who would cross real borders
and transform coming out into something more than a re-casting of the
104 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

American myth, “Go West, Young Man!” Or perhaps to a corner of the

Twist homestead, where a gay couple can set up house under the fatherly
watch of the stud duck? (Proulx 2005, 24). Stated precisely, the manner in
which male homosexual desire is constructed, understood, and practiced in
the film exposes “coming-out” as a myth productive only for the policing
of aberrant desire. Given the ahistorical character of the film, the manner in
which arguably the most significant period in the American gay movement
appears to have already ended before it began, the fracturing of the family
unit might restart that history to include the issues of class and race as well.
That possibility emerges in how both Jack and Ennis foreshorten the
panoptic gaze by exposing its limits. The myth of coming out is what lures
Jack to his death, his enactment of the death drive, even his very embodiment
of it constitutes a fissure in the codependent myth of a happy, heterosexual
family. His mobility threatens the focus of the panopticon. Ennis, who
refuses to come out, who understands from the beginning that he is being
watched, pushes the logic of inversion to an illogical extreme, so inverting
the panoptic gaze that he recovers an exceptionally exiguous space that opens
up a messianic dimension precisely because it does not register or is out of
register. What such an inversion withholds constitutes the possibility of a
promise or a vow. Since the love story that occasions such a vow is already
over before it has begun, the promise remains intact, never fully registered
or articulated. The oversight and mapping of sexuality, in other words, can
account neither for what occurs on the other side of the border nor for
what can be clearly located or marked within its borders.

Seen (Scene) from the Rear

If we recall once more Guy Hocquenghem’s 1975 analysis of homosexual

desire, the construction of same-sex desire in the film is nothing if not
homophobic handiwork: “There is no subdivision of desire into homo- and
heterosexual. Desire emerges in multiple forms, whose components are only
visible a posteriori, according to how we manipulate it” (1993, 49–50). If
desire is thus polymorphous, more adequately defined in terms of plenitude
and not lack, then any analysis of desire in Brokeback Mountain must attend
to how such desire is manipulated a posteriori. I have already mentioned
how the rearview mirror is the lens through which the homosexual gaze
is captured. Up until the last several scenes, the film’s celebrated sweeping
landscapes are framed as a series of postcards, something that is already
 “I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” 105

amply apparent from the screenplay. “The thousand sheep, the dogs, the
horses. JACK and ENNIS and the mules slowly flow out above the tree
line into the vast flowering meadows of the mountainside” (McMurtry
and Ossana 2005, 6). No conversation interrupts the flowering visual; the
panorama is the story; homosexuals like mules flow into and become a part
of the panoptic frame.4 Several scenes later Jack and Ennis sit around the
campfire. The acoustical accompaniment is minimal, only their chewing and
a crackling fire. The entire scene is shot at dusk, already subsumed by the
flickering visual vocabulary of memory (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 12).
Two scenes shortly thereafter repeat the pattern, early and amply filling
up the photo album with picture postcards: Jack and Ennis are on horseback,
“moving higher up the mountain to new pastures” (McMurtry and Ossana
2005, 16). The scene evokes the Greek pastoral; no voices from the present
intrude upon the bucolic bliss of the past. And the scene that ends with
their only on-screen fuck begins at sunset with Jack singing a Pentecostal
hymn, “Water walkin’ Jesus.” The screenplay describes his rendition as “sad”
and “dirge-like,” “causing coyotes to yip in the distance” (McMurtry and
Ossana 2005, 17). That is, the night of their celebrated love-making is
already framed by a dirge-like sadness with Jack asking the water-walking
Jesus to “take him away,” which prayer will ironically come to be answered
(McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 17). The entire homosexual love affair, in
other words, always has something of the character of a souvenir, an affair
to be remembered before it ever occurs. The most poignant and thus tell-
ing souvenir is, of course, Ennis’s blood-stained shirt that Jack steals as a
keepsake after the first, and what will prove to be the last, summer spent
together on Brokeback Mountain. They are never again seen having sex,
as if they have always already made love. Their relationship is a series of
post-coital-a-tergo intervals, some that last as long as four years. Exchanging
postcards is all that is afforded them between those few high-altitude fucks.
And if all that they have, according to Jack, is Brokeback Mountain, it is
only a postcard of Brokeback Mountain, hung on the inside of a closet
door inside a trailer.
What I will call, albeit somewhat ironically, the poststructural epis-
temology of the story, the coming-to-know who and what is queer based
upon an a posteriori manipulation of desire, also seems to undo its own
postscript.5 Such a dynamic evinces itself already in the final scene when the
camera shows how Ennis had reversed the order of the shirts and placed his
on top. Blood is exchanged in this exchange, at least metonymically, just as
Ennis and Jack can be said to have exchanged blood products metonymically
106 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

in Mexico. This combination of metonymy and inversion opens up new

pathways (and pathogens) for bloodlines to redraw the map of desire by
becoming as unreadable as the patronymic “Del Mar.” Then looking back,
manipulating a posteriori the positions of the shirts, renders it impossible to
read the trace blood on the shirts, which blood Jack, via Mexico, will already
have mixed or contaminated with that on Ennis’s shirt. If the reconfigura-
tion of bloodlines that occurs as a result of a poststructural epistemology
might serve, in keeping with the liminal function of homosexuality in the
story and film, to pathologize same-sex desire, the dynamic generated by its
metonymical character de-secures that boundary. Something is not properly
bounded, which is not to say that it is unbounded, but rather that its exigu-
ous character confuses those boundaries, and as we come to see, turns in
on itself, rendering the homosexual script illegible.
Inversion, as I use it here, means that male homosexuality is a sub-
category of sexuality in general, that it exists only in relation to or over
and against heterosexuality.6 As such, it should be calculable, which is to
say it should subscribe to a rational or natural order of things and thus
ensure that the wife and kids are never really out of the picture. Even if the
homosexual act always occurs outdoors, it requires nature, which in turn
helps to “naturalize” it. “Stemming the rose” stems from nature, and that
eases the transition back into the family, where the family tree can continue
to bloom. Homosexuality becomes dependent on heterosexuality; it looks to
nature for sanction. But such sanction requires acknowledgment of the prior-
ity of heterosexuality and the family. That is one reason why there are more
scenes of men screwing women than of Jack and Ennis stemming the rose.
Moreover, homosexuality (or what we see of it) is synonymous with
butt-fucking. No reference, let alone filming of oral sex is seen, and no
foreplay is ever shown. But if the homosexual is invited into the family via
nature, the family boundaries are apparently restored once he is inside, and
any precedence that might cleave to coitus-a-tergo or the homosexual way
of doing things is quickly reversed and re-coded. As the short story makes
clear, the missionary position is to be assumed in the bedroom. “What she
[Alma] hated” was anal sex, but when Ennis consents to doing it in a way
proper for married couples, Alma insists he use protection. Ennis will do
so only if she consents to having more of his babies. She responds that she
would if he were able to support them. The homosexual, unable to support
his family, prefers to butt-fuck his wife. The short story makes this con-
nection between (re)productive and impoverished sex explicit: “And under
that, thought, anyway, what you like to do don’t make too many babies”
 “I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” 107

(Proulx 2005, 16). The sentence’s odd construction, whereby “that” can
be thought anyway but in a straight way, points to the manner in which
homosex is always an afterthought, even if the initial positioning of bodies
suggests its precedence. In such fashion, homosex, as the floating signifier
of this afterthought, is circumscribed.
The positioning of bodies such that one gaze is met by the other
constitutes the heterosexual union whereby children are produced if the
father is also economically productive; such reciprocity secures the space
in which man and wife come together. Homosex is unbounded insofar,
as Leo Bersani notes, both men look out across the horizon in an endless
extension of self (1995, 166). Coming out, at least if it is linked to butt-
fucking on Brokeback Mountain, has the potential to exceed all boundaries,
save that the expansive extensivity of this queer union can only reach as
far as the eye, which is not far enough to escape the boss man Aguirre’s
10 = 42 binoculars.
Nature, moreover, does not cooperate; early snowstorms end Jack and
Ennis’s romance on Brokeback Mountain. From now on, their relationship
will always be something of a fairy tale, a once-upon-a-time moment whose
sequels will always be interrupted and discontinued due to family obliga-
tions. There are limits to coming out, and such limits are intended to secure
the family. Just as the positioning of bodies is as rigid as it is prescribed in
the family, the homosexual can only come out insofar as he is positioned
alongside, at the margins of, the family. After all, Jack’s idea of homosexual
bliss is quite filial—setting up house on the outskirts of the Twist homestead.
In this regard, Jack’s ashes, or the fact that his father, despite all his disdain
for Jack and his dreams, will not relinquish his ashes and allow Ennis to
spread them on Brokeback Mountain, indicates the stakes in not allowing
the homosexual’s ashes to be spread across what might be an infinite expanse,
particularly should the winds pick up and strew them all across the West.
(Jacks widow Lurleen keeps the other half in Texas.) Of course, according
to the poststructural epistemology of the film, his ashes are always already
everywhere, which not only speaks to the end of their relationship before
it has begun but also to a threat which demands that even in death the
homosexual take up his place inside the family plot. Reducing him to ashes
alone is not enough to eliminate the risk of the contagion, particularly when
those ashes will already have been to Mexico.
If, as Ennis fears, the homosexual urge might come upon him at
any time (“Bottom line, we’re around each other and this thing grabs onto
us again in the wrong place, wrong time, we’ll be dead”; McMurtry and
108 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

Ossana 2005, 52) and if it is so irresistible that it might break out even
under the watchful eye of Ennis’s horrified wife, it needs to be called out,
lest it secretly enter the family as some kind of sleeper cell. But if this
strange thing, as Ennis calls it, can happen upon even those who insist
they are not queer, what means are there to control what by definition
is uncontrollable? Something must elicit its expression. While there is no
evidence that either Jack or Ennis do more than keep company with sheep,
sleeping with sheep is a means to produce homosexual desire. It does so
by fortifying a metonymic chain that for centuries has linked bestiality and
male-male desire (Bredbeck 1991, 5). That alone, however, is not enough
to induce transgression, save that forcing one of the two herders to sleep
in those parts is, as Jack laments, “not right.” Unlawful sleeping with sheep
thus becomes unlawful sleeping with another man, unlawful insofar as it
violates, on the one hand, the terms of the contract with Aguirre and, on
the other, it puts sheep and thus, by extension, nature at risk. Since it is
not “right,” Ennis must do the “right” thing and sleep with Jack.
If Jack and Ennis’s affair is then something of a setup, if they are framed
for homosexuality, their homosexuality is thus required. But for what? The
most obvious answer is for the police; that is, Jack and Ennis commit the
transgressions that necessitate surveillance. The law of the father, who in
this context is the internalized enforcer of the biopolitical regime, requires
homosexuals insofar as they establish a limit without which there can be no
law.7 The dead sheep that Jack and Ennis discover after having abandoned
the sheep for each other demonstrates that the law is already in force. The
word need not be uttered nor the punishment refer specifically to the act.
The force of the law is nonetheless unmistakable: The dead sheep declare
that a practicing homosexual has slept here. The homosexual, in other words,
can either sleep with sheep or sleep with another man and kill sheep. In
both instances he is an instrument of the law, allowing for its expression.
If desire, even aberrant desire, desires the law, then the homosexual threat
is a welcome one, ensuring that the homosexual can never really come out
to anything but an always already delimited space. Even from afar they are
within the purview of the boss, Aguirre, who by forcing one to sleep with
sheep is getting precisely what he wanted. The real reason he rejects Jack’s
request to herd sheep the following year is less because of what he witnesses
and due more to Ennis’s absence. Without Ennis he won’t get what he wants.
That also explains why both Aguirre and Alma, Ennis’s wife, only reveal
what they have witnessed later, after the fact or a posteriori. Withholding
such information invites repeated transgressions, which, in turn, only serve
to reinforce the law.
 “I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” 109

Such reenforcements are synonymous with rearticulations, which is

often enough to have the desired effect. “You ever get the feeling,” Ennis
asks Jack, “I don’t know, when you’re in town, and someone looks at you
suspicious . . . like he knows. And then you get out on the pavement, and
everyone, lookin’ at you, and maybe they all know too?” (McMurtry and
Ossana 2005, 71). The results of such self-policing are predictably violent,
too. When Alma finally confronts Ennis after a Thanksgiving dinner at the
home of her new family, his reaction is practically violent. He raises his fist
and can barely restrain from beating the one who knows more than she ever
gave onto. While he does not bash Alma, he does beat on the truck driver
in the next scene, who was forced to brake to keep from hitting Jack. The
trucker yells out, “Hey, asshole, watch where you’re goin’,” at which point,
“without hesitation, ENNIS runs around the pickup, punches right inside
the open driver window . . . yanks open the driver door, drags the huge
man out . . . pummeling him and kicking him” (McMurtry and Ossana
2005, 80). The outed asshole’s violent response invites an even more violent
response from the trucker, “who doesn’t let up” (2005, 80). In other words,
he gives the self-policing queer just what he asked for.
Seen in this light, Aguirre’s anger is more than the voyeuristic curiosity
indicated above. In the film, at least, he doesn’t witness the act, but he knows
it happened by the mixed or impure herd that is returned to him. In the
scene that follows Jack’s success in convincing Ennis that storms prevent him
from venturing up the mountain to sleep with the sheep, they discover that
Aguirre’s herd has mixed with a Chilean’s herd. Upon their return, Aguirre
notes, “some of these never went up there with you” (McMurtry and Ossana
2005, 26). Hispanic sheep and American sheep have mixed. After the fact,
there is evidence that Jack and Ennis have exchanged blood products, which
is readable both by Aguirre and the unreadable paint brands on the sheep.
If Aguirre is truly angry, it is only because fewer sheep returned from the
mountain than originally ascended it. Homosexual unions are not only not
pure, but they are also nonreproductive. Such unions offer apt occasion for
Aguirre to assert his authority. That is not to suggest that Aguirre—whose
own name is from the Basque for open pasture and field— is gleeful that
they have stemmed the rose.8 Clearly, he is not. Rather, his anger celebrates
the homosexual union insofar as that union supplies incontrovertible proof
of the need for the law, which, as it turns out, is nature’s law. Aguirre, in
other words, is the law’s most felicitous expression.
Withholding knowledge about what one has witnessed is less a matter
of volition or even fear and more the inescapable condition of how things
come to be known, according to what I have called the poststructural
110 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

epistemology of the film. There is always something belated about the

homosexual. Their last time together, after all, is interrupted by a flashback
when Ennis embraced Jack from behind on Brokeback Mountain. “They
gently rocked back and forth, the shadow of their bodies a single column
against the rock.” The screenplay is remarkable for what it reveals and does
not reveal: “They are wrapped in a closeness that satisfies some shared and
sexless hunger” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 84).
If the immediate question is why such hunger is sexless, the obvious
answer is that such poststructural awareness is intended to de-sex or even
castrate those given to male-male desire. But in this instance, the merging
of homosexual bodies—bodies that have already been marked by difference
through heterosexual unions or through heteronormative exclusion—opens
up onto a vastness that the foreshortened gaze inside the tent or the site of
their first fuck simultaneously disabled. That shared closeness belongs to the
past; it is merely a single shadow, but it may not be entirely irretrievable.
If the conditions under which it can be retrieved are unclear at this point,
the scene accords to the logic of the postcard. One has already returned
from holiday by the time the addressee reads the card, just as this scene of
remembered closeness closes with a “childhood song, from some long-ago
memory.” Even if the postcard is returned to sender, as it is to Ennis after
Jack’s death, the messages on the card are always an open secret.

Figure 5.1. “They were wrapped in a closeness that satisfies some shared and sex-
less hunger.”
 “I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” 111

The policing of the homosexual relationship, even if we are begin-

ning to note slippages in those mechanisms, is not limited to declaring the
homosexual relationship DOA. Rather, its epistemological structure includes
a reliable mapping of same-sex desire, which, in fact, is evident from the
opening shot. A cattle truck moves west through a dark background as
light begins to surface in the east. The truck’s tracks create a line of light
that allows for its vector to be trailed. The light also serves to divide the
uncharted and heretofore darkened space in two, anticipating thereby how
homosexual and heterosexual desire will be viewed in terms of a divide to
allow for calculation of what is on the other side of that divide. Moreover,
the one who drives establishes the divide. His heeding the call to go West
produces a boundary, one that Ennis, the passenger, will frequently cross
and patrol. His frequent violent outbursts in the film reveal how homo-
sexuality polices itself; it draws its own line as the cattle truck does in the
opening scene. That Jack, unbeknownst to Ennis, will steal the shirt that
was stained with blood in what is something other than a lover’s first quar-
rel demonstrates how violence underwrites their relationship, preserving its
memory and anticipating, at least, Jack’s fate.

Rear Ended

The law governing inversion is most evident in how apparent banter comes
to acquire a sexual undertone if the punch line, so to speak, is already known
in advance. That is, what in a different context might seem like idle chatter
acquires added significance since the temporal inversions of the film render
such chatter a snide commentary on what has already happened. Viewers,
for example, know that this is a gay cowboy movie, so they are already in
on the joke. This is also what confirms the impression that homosexuality
is on everyone’s mind. A few examples will suffice: Lurleen will lament,
“It’s funny, ain’t it? Husbands don’t never seem to dance with their wives.
(sarcastic). Why do you think that is, Jack?” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005,
75) Her “sarcastic” tone betrays the secret, which has always been an open
one. Jack likes to dance, just not with women. Nonetheless, he takes the bait
and dances with Lashawn, the wife of Randall, as if to signal that women
are not the problem, his wife is. The open secret still needs to maintain
the structure of a secret.9
Homosexuality, as the implied double of the entendre is unmistakable.
In fact, throughout the first two-thirds of the film. Jack, in reference to his
112 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

mother, offers his interpretation of Pentecostal Christianity: “I don’t know

what the Pentecost is . . . Mama never explained it. (pause) I guess it’s when
the world ends and fellas [no gals implied] like you and me march off to
hell.” The pregnant pause gives Ennis all the time he needs to pick up on
Jack’s meaning, “Uh, uh, speak for yourself. You may be a sinner, but I ain’t
yet had the opportunity” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 17). Ennis’s remarks
follow what the screenplay describes as a sudden loosening of his tongue
(McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 15). And since it is not long before they will
come to abandon the sheep for each other, the retort reads like a plea to
Jack to offer him the opportunity to sin. Retrospective knowledge, in other
words, transforms the apparently innocent remark (“It’s not right Aguirre
makes us sleep with sheep.”) into one loaded with homosexual overtones,
articulating with increasing force the law of same-sex desire. The scene in the
bar, a straight bar, when Jack offers to buy a drink for the rodeo clown who
earlier that day pulled him from harm’s way, is understood by the clown to
be a come-on, although no mention of sex is made. Whatever isn’t explicit
is explicitly homosexual. More to the point are Aguirre’s first words to Jack
and Ennis as they await his arrival and a chance for employment, “Get your
screwing asses in here.” That seems to open the back door for Jack to insist
that men’s asses are for screwing: “Aguirre got all over his ass after a storm
last year led to the loss of so many sheep.” Or, “Joe will have your ass”
if you let the sheep stray (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 7). And on that
fateful night when Jack convinces Ennis that he’s too drunk to journey up
the mountain to sleep with the sheep, he reprises the theme, “Freeze your
ass off when that fire dies down” (2005, 18). Finally, when Jack steadies his
gun to shoot a two-point buck, Ennis remarks, “Was getting’ tired of your
dumb ass missin’ ” (2005, 11–12). Such remarks prepare Ennis to have Jack’s
“missin’ ” ass. But again, such retrospective knowledge, understood as one
form of inversion, is not entirely predictable. Aguirre will not have Ennis’s
ass; instead, Ennis will have Jack’s ass. Reversals, in other words, may not
be fully containable, however calculable they may seem.
The visual framing of how retrospection calls homosexuality out needs
to be remarked more fully. The first time we see Ennis is after the trucker
screeches to a halt to let Ennis out, departing almost before Ennis touches
ground and spraying him with dust. In other words, the truck that marked
the divide can now dump Ennis. The dust signals that a line has been drawn
in the dirt, and Ennis, who is dirt poor and carries only a grocery sack
with a shirt and a pair of Levis, is immediately marked as some kind of
trade. He stands beneath a sign, “Farm and Ranch Employment Agency,”
 “I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” 113

smoking a cigarette and striking what comes to be a homoerotic pose.10 For

once Jack comes to notice Ennis, he “stiffens a little” and then looks away
(McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 2). It is now that Jack first uses the rearview
mirror in an attempt to shave. The pose that comes to be homoerotic calls
forth a rear view that not only teletypes the framing of the relationship that
will come to be but also prompts the suitor to tidy up. The furtive glance
offered by the rearview mirror of Ennis the Marlboro Man is replayed on
Brokeback Mountain when Jack catches a rear view of Ennis, dressed only in
boots and socks, “slop[ping] a washcloth under his arms, between his legs”
(McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 13). Viewing the behind might cause Jack
once again to stiffen a little—although it would be innocent enough if we
didn’t already know what it will come to mean. Such rear (rare) viewing is
all Jack and Ennis have, seldom together and only together under the sign
of imminent departure and doom.
Worth noting is that reversal, which term I use synonymously with
inversion, apparently extends to sexual positions. Ennis may start out as the
top dog, but subsequent positioning suggests otherwise. At times Jack is
cuddled by Ennis, at other times the reverse. At least once, the film shows
Ennis’s head on Jack’s chest. Any such knowledge about who plays what
role in the relationship, according to the logic of hetero-normativity, is
preterited. More than beg the question as to what happens when the sym-
metrical other of heterosexual partnering engages in a symmetrical reversal
of its own, the reversal reinscribes the backward trajectory of any knowledge

Figure 5.2: The pose that comes to be homoerotic calls forth a rear view.
114 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

about homosexuality, save that it now sponsors a misprision and threatens

to obscure the rearview.
With the appearance of such a misprision arises the urgent need to
immobilize the queer. The instruments for such discipline and punishment
are clear by now: relegating all homosexual relationships to a thing of the
past, linking that trajectory with death, bashing—self-inflicted or other-
wise—and if necessary, death. The death penalty need not be executed but
merely inferred. That much is clear when Ennis relates what he recalls was
the fate of the two old queers, Earl and Rich, who had “ranched together
down home” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 53). Ennis was not a witness
to the bashing in which allegedly “they’d took a tire iron to Earl, spurred
him up, drug him around by his dick till it pulled off. Hell, for all I know
he [my father] done the job” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 53). He comes
to know this since ‘”my daddy, he made sure me and brother seen it.” Not
only is knowledge about Earl and Rich preterited in this instance, but the
omnipresence of the father, as both educator and executioner, attests to the
veracity of such knowledge.
His omnipresence, however, is not enough to keep the homosexual in
his place. If all of the potential slippages in what can be called the biopo-
litical regime threaten the border whose crossings are meant only to affirm
the limits, then a different kind of fix is needed. In this respect, the film,
the short story, and the screenplay are shameless in their reliance on gay
clichés to make of the homosexual a type. Both Ennis’s and Jack’s childhood
offer simplistic pathologies to explain and thus contain what happened on
Brokeback Mountain or on the others side of the divide. Ennis comes from
a broken family or a completely broke one, since his parents left his brother,
sister, and him only $24 in a cookie jar after they had “run themselves off
the road” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 16–17). Since the bank took the
ranch, Ennis was already nowhere as a child. And given the manner in which
property is attached to the patronymic in a heteronormative society governed
by the phallus, Ennis is already destined to not have “it” from the moment
his father runs himself off. More predictable is how the internalized presence
of his father haunts his entire negotiation of his struggle with the meaning
of his sexuality. If Ennis’s mode of being in the world is structured by the
past in the form of dreams and flashbacks, then such memory is already
ruled by the violent and omnipresent memory of the father, who may well
have castrated the old queer. And when sons don’t have fathers, they end
up herding sheep. They come to rehearse and inhabit the Greek pastoral.
The catachresis of his name—Del Mar is neither Greek nor “American”—
 “I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” 115

articulates or rather comes to articulate the displacement of one whose exile

is instrumental to a constant recollection of the father. In other words, he
is disowned by his name, which does not mean he doesn’t seek it.
Jack’s childhood charts an even more direct path to queerdom. His
father, a well-known bull rider, refused to share his talents with his son
(McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 17). His withholding thus asserts his authority
in a more powerful or—shall we say—latent way. The short story is unequivo-
cal in its description of the scene of castration. Ennis, upon climbing the
stairs after Jack’s death to see Jack’s bedroom, recalls Jack’s story about how
Jack came to learn that he was “dick-clipped” and his father was not. “He
had been three or four, he said, always late getting to the toilet . . . and
often as not left the surroundings sprinkled down. The old man blew up
about it and this one time worked into a crazy rage: Christ, he licked the
stuffin’ out a me, knocked me down on the bathroom floor, whipped me
with his belt . . . Then he says, ‘You want to know what it’s like with piss
all over the place? I’ll learn you,’ and he pulls it out and lets go all over
me . . . but while he was hosing me down I seen he had some extra mate-
rial I was missing” (Proulx 2005, 25). Not only does this scene predispose
the one who has been disposed upon to go seeking that missing part but it
also leads him to seek it in backrooms in Mexico. A metaphorical logic is
in play here, making of the homosexual a type whose acts can be explained
by appeal to a pathology or an overarching logic.11 If it weren’t for fathers
there would be no homosexuals, but if it weren’t for homosexuals, the law
of the father would be unenforced, even perhaps unenforceable. If such
memories for Jack are indelible, that does not confirm their accuracy. Such
a form of transference virtually guarantees that that there will be gaps in
the metaphorical logic of the film; the suturing, as I have tried to indicate
throughout, is exposed.
Castration engenders guilt, and the guilty suffer economically as well.
They have no possessions. At the very least, they do not have the economic
mobility necessary to settle down. After Jack asks Ennis, as he often does,
what they are going to do, Ennis replies, “I doubt there’s nothing we can
do. I’m stuck with what I got here. Makin’ a livin’s about all” (McMurtry
and Ossana 2005, 49; second italics added). If all he has can even be called
a living, it is surely no livelihood, and it prevents him from setting up
house in the neighborhood. He is always on the move, a transient cowboy
forever out of reach for Jack. The reversal or inversion here is not that class
precludes their union, but rather that the impoverished one rather than the
rich one is out of reach.12
116 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

Nowhere is Ennis’s abjection and destitution more poignantly expressed

than in virtually his final words to Jack, after Jack makes what has become
the homophobic shibboleth of the film or the quintessential put-down of
queer cowboys: “I wish I knew how to quit you.” “Then why don’t you,”
Ennis pleads, “Why don’t you let me be? It’s because of you, Jack, that
I’m like this. I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 83).
Jack then moves toward Ennis, Ennis pushes him away, Jack comes toward
him again, and Ennis does not resist. “Come here . . . it’s all right. It’s all
right . . . damn you, Ennis.” The screenplay continues, “And then . . . they
hug one another, a fierce, desperate embrace—managing to torque things
almost to where they had been, for what they’ve just said is no news: as
always, nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved” (2005, 83). It
is at this point that the film flashes back to Brokeback Mountain 1963.
Jack, despite all his border crossings, has a place for Ennis to come to. The
ellipses in both his speech and the screenplay’s directions suggest a spatial
territorialization that is simultaneously undone by language, or rather, it is
unsayable. Of course, the place is Brokeback Mountain, an irretrievable past
to which all male-male homosexual relationships are assigned. Nonetheless,
the moving toward Ennis who is coming toward Jack recalls the reversals
of sexual positions—all the more apparent in the use of the word “torque,”
which is the root of “queer.” Such torquing circumscribes a space for them
to come together, to comfort one another. Ennis, as we recall, even sings to
Jack something from a long-ago memory (2005, 84). The past, Brokeback
Mountain, takes one to a more distant past, which, as the continuing sets
of ellipses indicate, resists articulation. The homosexual-heterosexual con-
tinuum, so essential for the policing of desire, is interrupted. The flash of
what was never begun, ended or resolved in the past opens up a space in
which queers can be themselves; i.e., torque, which makes it all the more
urgent that the film return to the “continuous” present and Jack and Ennis
to “their separate and difficult lives” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 84).

Rarefied (Rearified) Scenes

The attempt to keep a look out for homosexuality by viewing it through

the lens of inversion depends upon a rear view, and a rear view is always
temporally and spatially obscured. What is not seen, or cannot be seen,
thereby becomes possible, its potential is there precisely because it is vir-
tual or because it might also not be, which is the same one can say of any
 “I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” 117

picture postcard: It is not “here.” The most instructive example of how this
potentiality undoes the law of inversion is in how it frustrates castration
and the enforcement of the laws governing homo- and heterosexual unions
that issue from castration. Such a threat, as we know, also extends to the
economic order based upon who has “it” and does not. As Leo Bersani
points out, coitus-a-tergo is not specific to male homosexuals, but a com-
pensatory possibility is. The penetrator offers his cock to the penetrated. But
if making his cock disappear inside another man threatens the penetrator
with castration, the stiff cock of the penetrated is a compensatory offering
(Bersani, Homos 1995, 112). In Brokeback Mountain such an economy
accords with a poststructural epistemology. In the tent Jack places Ennis’s
hand on his cock, which inspires Ennis to flip Jack on all fours and pen-
etrate him. He does so with the assurance that what he will give Jack has
already been returned to him. In such fashion, the castrated or dispossessed
have always only had it in reserve. Potentiality can thus be stated as fol-
lows: “I will not have been not castrated.” Or, “I will not have not loved.”
The double negative does not convert to a positive, “I will have loved,”
but to a potentiality that inheres in the difference between an affirmative
formulation and its negated denial. Such potentiality echoes the affirmative
without the affirmative ever having been iterated. It retains the character
of a threshold, which is not, however, a passageway to actuality. If such
semantics are too unwieldy, the shirt that Jack steals from Ennis articulates
such potentiality, if only by resisting such articulation. While evincing the
end of their relationship, the shirt also preserves its possibility to both be
and not be; that is, not not be.13 When they are in Jack’s closet, which we
learn retrospectively, Ennis will not not be. And when the shirts are moved
by Ennis, with his shirt now on top, Jack will not not be. The movement
of the shirts constitutes the construction of a paradoxically de-territorialized
space in which the shirts are a trace of not not being, for such potentiality
never attains to anything but a trace or an echo.
That impossible possibility comes to be articulated, insofar as it can
be, with the intrusion of what I will call the hyper-real in the film, namely
when Ennis learns from Jack’s wife, Lurleen, of Jack’s death. Once Ennis’s
postcard to Jack is returned, the mode of communication that secured the
poststructural epistemology is threatened. Ennis is thus forced to commu-
nicate via telephone. The extent to which knowledge about the homosexual
is undermined is immediately apparent when Ennis informs Lurleen that
Brokeback Mountain was where Jack and he once herded sheep. “ ‘Well,
he said it was his favorite place,’ she responds, ‘I thought he meant to get
118 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

drunk”’ (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 87). Does she know now why it
was his favorite place? Lurleen’s “level voice” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005,
86) betrays nothing. The illegibility or epistemological uncertainty becomes
explicit with the explanation of his death. Lurleen offers the official account:
a tire blew up, its rim broke Jack’s nose and knocked him unconscious,
whereupon he drowned in his own blood. At that point, the film flashes to
a “man being beaten unmercifully by three assailants, one of whom uses a
tire iron” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 87). The screenplay and short story
would have us believe that Ennis, at best, is uncertain as to what really
happened, and at most, reads behind the alibi offered by Lurleen. But the
flash could just as likely be a flashback whereby Ennis attempts to stitch
together the truth by referring to what he claims to have remembered was
the scene of the bashing of Earl that his father insisted he visit. If the flash
of the bashing is in Ennis’s mind, it relies on what he might have witnessed
as a child but only after such memory has been routed through decades of
internalized homophobia. And who is to say that his father’s account after
the fact is any more accurate?
Lurleen’s account triggers in Ennis a memory of a memory, but both
memories are suspect or unreliable. If, in fact, Jack was murdered and
the flash is a more accurate account of events, what was the motive? The
poststructural epistemology of the film points to a gay bashing, but when
they last met, Jack offered a different possible motive: “I kinda got a thing
going’ with a ranch foreman’s wife over in Childress. Expect to get shot by
Lurleen or the husband, one or the other” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005,
80). Belated to be sure, knowledge about the homosexual requires a lot of
cross-referencing and suturing. The film, unlike the story and screenplay,
does not foreclose the possibility that Lurleen is imagining the true events
as she tells Ennis the official party line. Based upon what Ennis last heard
from Jack about an affair with another woman, she could have been in on
the bashing, if there was one. Was she onto Jack? But what was she onto?
His homosexuality, in which case her response to learning about the real
significance for Jack of Brokeback Mountain would appear less uncertain.
Or would it? Do her eyes well with tears because she now knows why Jack
never stiffened for her? Or does she now realize that he never really was
cheating on her with another woman, or does Ennis tip her off to a differ-
ent sort of contagion his trips to Mexico might have introduced into the
family? Or is she onto Jack’s apparent affair with “another fella” that Jack’s
father sarcastically remarks was “goin’ a split up with his wife and come
back here?” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 90). And what is the source of
 “I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” 119

the father’s sarcasm? Is he making fun of Jack because of his outlandish

dreams or because of his open secret, i.e., his homosexuality? People, part-
ners, and places now constitute an economy of uncontainable substitutions.
The ease with which the double entendres of the first parts of the film
could be read—sleeping with sheep, sinning, hitting on the rodeo clown,
and looking for “missin’ ” asses—is no longer comforting. Even before the
scene or scenes of Jack’s death, Ennis’s final scene with Cassie indicated
that the epistemological closet was under siege. After Ennis insists that he
probably was no fun, Cassie replies, “Oh, Ennis . . . girls don’t fall in love
with fun!” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 86). But do he and Cassie even
share the same meaning of “fun”?
Language is returning to the closet, re-concealing itself.14 And as it
does, it is perhaps necessary to take one last breath here and situate this
final reading in the context of the theoretical argument worked out in the
introduction. In the opening discussion of “Death in Venice” Tadzio appar-
ently signaled to Aschenbach, gesturing toward a space beyond the reach
of the camera, beyond all the controls over queer love that have plagued
men and women given to same-sex desire since the early to mid-nineteenth
century in the West. To recall, for a brief moment the figure of Tadzio is
dappled; the sun and mist appear to make of his frame an emerging poin-
tillist image. Is Tadzio assuming shape or disappearing? Rather than answer
that question, I considered that fleeting moment as worthy of examination
as a site or pregnant with potentiality or something that both is and is
not. That potentiality became a means to re-think LGBTQ current politics,
whose agenda, insofar as it is cleaved to military service and marriage, were
outgrowths of the values that shaped the emerging nuclear family and nation
state around 1800. At the same time, narratives from that period possessed
untapped energies for a reparative reading (recalling again Sedgwick), for
different kinds of queer coming-togethers. The opening chapters explored
how the “queer” came to be a type, a necessary but reviled exile whose
existence on the margins also served to secure the borders of those living
inside them. But, of course, only in exile might one espy or approach the
space to which Tadzio pointed. The eventual task of the project was to
reanimate those repressed energies of the earlier texts, to listen for stirrings
or echoes that could help articulate ever more clearly the potentialities of
those last scenes in “Death in Venice.” For this project, those stirrings first
achieved clarity enough in Roland Barthes’s reading of The Sorrows of Young
Werther to allow for the formulation: I will not have not loved. (Queer
echoes need time to traverse great spaces.). This chapter picks up on the
120 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

potentialities embedded in that formulation to traces other such potentiali-

ties not in 1800 Germany but rather in the American West on Brokeback
Mountain. If the introduction pieced together a counter-temporality from
modern American/English queer theory and contemplations about AIDS,
the readings that comprise the chapters sought literary expressions of this
coming community, forever displaced in the future. Finally, the discussion
of inversion in Proust, to repeat, is on dizzying display here with a new
twist. And as language returns to the closet, that space is secured by an
oath, unbreakable but forever unfulfilled, holding out bold alternatives to
the current LGBTQ agenda.

Nothin’ and Nowhere

From the beginning, there existed the threat that inversion would generate
a logic or acquire a dimension that threatened to uncouple the binary of
sexuality. The most obvious threat to positioning the homosexual was the
unreadable positions of the homosexual couple after fucking; who was in
whose arms did not provide the rear view necessary for assigning fixed roles.
The placing of Jack’s ashes in two places indicated how even in death there
was a struggle to keep the homosexual in his place, particularly one who
had ventured across the border to Mexico. And just what part of Jack Twist
is in or on the shirt first in his closet and then in Ennis’s? The souvenir of
gay love is now plural, dispersed and disseminated. The curiosity is that it
is an apparent return to the closet, but one whose depth is always undone,
and not an escape from it, which threatens the biopolitical vice squad. Can
we thus speak of a panoptic reversal, whereby the series of inversions now
has one looking through the other end of the binoculars? Whereas earlier
the double vision of binocularity served to reinforce a sexual binarism, now
nothing comes into focus; the object under inspection is retreating from
sight, just as language is calling something into reserve. And for good reason.
Twist, the figure around whom double entendre so often pivoted and thus
acquired meaning, is disseminated. His ashes will be in two places.
Worth mentioning is that in July of 1981 the New York Times pub-
lished its now infamous article, describing the so-called gay plague. The
movie professes absolute ignorance of AIDS, and there is no reason to even
suspect that Jack considers himself at risk, although tens of thousands will
already have been infected with the virus. The epistemological structure of
knowledge about the virus is consistent with that of the film. By going to
 “I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” 121

Mexico Jack nonetheless is asking for it, even if that will only come to be
known later. He solicits sex, probably even paying for it since he has the
kind of mobility Ennis lacks. When he finally admits to Ennis that he has
gone south of the border in search of what Ennis refused to give him, he
solicits a near violent response from Ennis, thereby reenforcing the violence
that underwrites but also forecloses their relationship. Moreover, his proud
boast, moments before, that his latest affair was bound to get him killed
indicates that he cannot resist asking for it. When he finally gets it, death,
he accomplishes metonymically in death what he could never have before,
an unbreakable bond with Ennis, secured by a closet. Such closet is a
metonymy for the house he hoped to set up on the outskirts of his father’s
ranch, save that there is no room for the father here.
Crossing borders is thus linked to ever closer spaces, which through
such crossings are flattened, an effect of looking through the wrong end
of the binoculars and reversing the panopticon. The movie now goes from
the phone booth to the Twist homestead to Jack’s room, preserved as it was
when he was a child, to his closet; then, to the flatness of a trailer park to
the inside of a trailer to the closet within a trailer to a shirt atop another
shirt. In other words, the uncontainable logic of inversion sponsors two
movements that are irreducible to one another. No logical enterprise links
dissemination with the closet. And so characteristically uncharacteristically,
Ennis, who has been virtually homeless his entire life, offers shelter to
Jack—or to Jack’s shirt. To be sure, there has been no liberation from the
nostalgic future anterior that reduced the homosexual relationship to a series
of postcards. The blood-stained shirt preserves the memory of a relationship
that was always only subjected to the self-policing violence of a panoptic
regime. But the undoing of the film’s metaphorical logic, whereby the inver-
sion of inversion produces a disseminated closet or a closeted dissemination,
is nothing short of remarkable in the final scene. In the tiny closet within
the closet or inside a mobile home on the great Northern plain are Jack’s
and Ennis’s shirt.
Closets replace sweeping landscapes and plains replace mountains.
These closets, however, are mobile. Ennis took the shirts from Jack’s closet,
and the final scene begins as he places numbers on a new mailbox, which
recalls the exchange of postcards that constituted their relationship between
high-altitude fucks. Ennis, as we know, has performed one more reversal or
inversion, placing his shirt on top—a metonymy for sexual repositioning
and for Ennis’s embrace and remembered embrace of Jack on Brokeback
Mountain. If that embrace, as both looked out onto a wide, seemingly open,
122 Echoes of a Queer Messianic

rolling and un-policed expanse, allowed Ennis “not to acknowledge who was
in his arms,” the metonymical embrace offers a form of sheltering in the
tiniest of spaces in the flattest of landscapes. His fixing the button on one
of the shirts substitutes as well for the embrace. The sheltering is offered
by one who himself was never protected from anyone and barely offered
shelter by his parents before they missed that one curve in the road. On
the closet door, inside the most claustrophobic of spaces, is the postcard of
Brokeback Mountain, which, in the short story, was special-ordered. The
card can be seen only if the door is opened, but such opening is clearly
within a neatly circumscribed space. The shirts are on a wire hanger on a
nail next to the postcard. Ennis adjusts the postcard so that it forms an
even line or assumes a symmetrical position with the view from the win-
dow of the “great bleakness of the vast Northern Plains” (McMurtry and
Ossana 2005, 97). Inside/outside, enclosed/unenclosed, top/bottom make
no sense here. Can one even speak logically of inversions here? Brokeback
Mountain is inside a closet, reduced to two dimensions, and the window
looks onto an outside whose horizon is as near as the window itself. The
gaze does not roam as did Aguirre’s. Looking in or looking out—is there
a difference? All depth perception is foreshortened or flattened. Even if the
panopticon can penetrate the space—and it does as far as the camera is
concerned—how does it register such a visual field? If there is no depth,
how does one pathologize homosexuality?
Moreover, Ennis’s last words are in the form of a performative, “Jack,
I swear. . . .” He apostrophizes Jack as if he were in the closet or existing
in the shirt or recalled by the postcard or just somewhere out there haunt-
ing the plain. But like Bartleby’s favorite reprise, “I prefer not to . . .”
the swearing is open-ended; no semiotic can predict or register what is
sworn. His words, “I swear,” echo the swearing of his last meeting with
Jack on Brokeback Mountain, “Jack fucking Twist” (McMurtry and Ossana
2005, 82), as he cursed the lover who confessed to crossing the border
into Mexico and who now is everywhere and nowhere. In this instance
the swearing comes with a twist, a term of endearment even if there is no
fucking going on. And in one final inversion or twist, it is now Ennis who
cannot quit Jack and has no desire to do so. Even that is uncertain, since
in the short story his recurrent dreams produce alternate affects, i.e., tears
or smiles (Proulx 28). More important, his swearing commits to nothing
and excuses nothing. It opens up onto a possibility that is as foreclosed as
the horizon espied through the window and as vast as the elliptical form
of its utterance that bears no semiotic congruity with closets inside closets.
 “I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” 123

Ennis, never seduced by the myth of coming out, secures the closet, just as
his last act is to close the closet door, but he is also “nowhere.” He affirms
the sheltering embedded in his vow. Little more can be said about such
a space and the pure performative that issues not from outside the closet
but seemingly from within it. The space is more likely a threshold, where
in and out, open and closed or closeted are contiguous. As the space that
allows for Ennis to take his vow, it might be just as imaginary or real as the
“pretend” space Jack always sought, “where the bluebirds sing and there’s a
whiskey spring” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 88).
And it is good as such. Whatever possibilities can issue for gay love,
constructed as it is according to the great American myth of coming out,
must never reveal their secret even when that secret is an open one, which
is to say an empty one. Or in returning it to the closet, Ennis, once the
instrument and enforcer of the border patrol, is now sovereign of a threshold
(just as he is the driver of the truck in the last scene).15 Of the sea, he is
mobile insofar as he is queer to all spaces. Even if he fixes the numbers on
his mailbox, his abode speaks to a mobility that is certainly not economic
but virtual or potential, consistent with the illogic of his name. Jack has
quitted him and not quitted him, preserved and sheltered in Ennis’s last
words, “Jack, I swear. . . .” The vow is spoken and not spoken and responds
to no command, least of all to one issued by the father and his law. What
is sworn to Jack can neither be quitted or acquitted. If such a threshold,
linguistic, spatial and temporal, is like Ennis, “nowhere and nothing,” that
nowhere is sheltered by a vow that betrays nothing.
 Notes

Introduction

1. Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film, which will be discussed below, makes this
explicit. The protagonist in the film is a composer (à la Mahler) whose exacting
standards strangle all emotion. A flashback shows the audience totally rejecting a
recent performance, which delights his friend and rival and whose cruel, uproarious
laughter haunts Aschenbach at times during the film.
2. In attempting to piece together fragments of an unacknowledged or unre-
alized past, the mixing of genres, in this case literature and film, helps to illuminate
a dimension otherwise obscured. That is, the film says something about the short
story that the latter is unable to say for itself, and vice versa.
3. See Potentialities, especially the introduction by Heller-Roazen, 14−18.
4. The visit occurred July 2015. A full transcript of his remarks
can be found at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/16/remarks-
president-after-visit-el-reno-federal-correctional-institution.
5. See Derrida, Spectres, 59−65. For an understanding of the centrality of
the “idea” in the work of Walter Benjamin see Khalib, 2−13.
6. My indirect reference is, of course, to Benjamin’s Angel of History. See
Mosès, 65−128.
7. See Pahl, “Geliebte Spricht,” 220−247. “ ‘Geliebte, sprich!’—wenn Frauen
sich haben,” In Penthesileas Versprechen: Exemplarische Studien über die literarische
Referenz, ed. Rüdiger Campe, Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2008.
8. The Truvada website (Truvada.com) confirms its effectiveness in reducing
the risk of HIV infection “when used with safer sex practices.” The oddness lies in
the fact that many gay men subscribe to the regimen for the very purpose of hav-
ing license to screw without a condom. Worth noting as well is that long-term use
has been associated with severe kidney damage, which is why users need to have
blood drawn every 3 to 6 months. The benefits of PREP must also be considered
in light of the possibility that gay men are convinced to adhere to a regimen that
might do significant harm to vital organs. At the very least, gay men are watched,

125
126 Notes to Introduction

followed, and tracked as a means of reducing a risk that requires adherence to

safer-sex practices—at least according to its website—that some gay men adhering
to PREP s regimen precisely do NOT want to practice.
9. The first showing of the quilt was in 1987 on the National Mall in
Washington, D.C. As of 2012 the quilt was comprised of 48,000, 3' = 6' panels
weighing more than 54 tons. www.aidsquilt.org.
10. Of course, the situation for HIV infected patient in the West, particularly
since 1994 has changed dramatically with the introduction of the cocktail. That
doesn’t diminish the Western-centric perspective of Garcia Düttmannn’s analysis
which presumes a certain self-conscious awareness about the disease and among
its carriers.
11. The contested origins of AIDS, including the false identification of Patient
Zero—a flight attendant accused of purposely infecting unsuspecting partners to
spread the disease—have often, as in this case, been twisted to conform to the
world’s understanding of gay people as sexual predators. That it is now presumed
to have originated in West Central Africa resonates with the tropical or jungle-like
origins of the plague in “Death in Venice.”
12. Clearly, I am re-purposing Maimonides and his proof of God via negative
theology. God does not not exist. GP 1.56−1.59.
13. Heidegger’s citation of Schelling is found in his lecture course from
1936 that also links sickness and truth. Odd is that Garcia Düttmannn does not
contextualize historically Heidegger”s own thinking about disease and evil in these
lectures, especially given the importance of the year for the Third Reich and Hei-
degger’s own shift in thought or “The Turn” (“Die Kehre”).
14. Epigenetics, which traces the genetic mutations introduced by trauma
and the transmission of that mutation to future generations, offers a very real and
certainly less lurid example of how such communities might unfold. Moreover,
the discovery of that mutation in the child of a Holocaust survivor resonates with
Bersani’s and Garcia Düttmannn’s observations: queer communities mourn a past
that never was, a death before its time. They give voice to the lingering echoes of
voices never heard—a potentiality that they carry forward and pass on (www.ncbi.
nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24029109).
15. Ohi has followed up this volume with another fine mongraph, Dead
Letters Sent: Queer Literary Transmission. What is queer about transmission is its
belatedness; the voice that animated the letter previously is silenced and replaced
by another or rather potentially replaced. “If not always marked explicitly as such,
potentiality is a recurrent topos in queer writing, where it is a mode of sexual and
political critique and where imaginings of utopian sexual possibilities take shape in
reading and rewritings of precursor texts” (Ohi, Dead Letters 29).
16. The clarity of the neologism is enhanced by its shared root with “panop-
ticon,” thereby linking optimism, which carries with it no small measure of consent,
to the controls of the panopticon. The panoptimistic subject complies hopefully.
 Notes to Introduction 127

17. Bersani’s notion of self-obliteration has obvious resonances here, with

the apparent difference that sex itself and not just desire initiates the breakdown.
18. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, while offering a much needed boost
to lift us out of desperation and offer some form of hope, is really just that, a Gay
National Anthem, whose joyous promise of “a seat at the table” conveniently brack-
ets out the devastation wreaked and often unaddressed across the globe (particularly
when the play’s two parts were written).
19. While “invert” was the widely accepted or used term to describe those
given to same-sex desire in the nineteenth century, the German word “verkehrt”
already gives an indication of how polysemic the term is. “Traveled,” “perverted,”
and “inverted” given an indication of how inversion opens up various paths that
are not easily mapped.
20. Halperin points out that among gay audiences (who need or may not
practice same-sex sex but share what he considers to be a gay sensibility or gayness
before sex) explicitly themed gay shows are less appealing than those in which the
gayness of the show is dispersed and not explicit (Halperin, 92–108).
21. My use of “self ” is not intended to reduce the political to a band of
brothers or selves, but rather to highlight Schmitt’s debt to Hobbes, since both
ground their thinking in a “natural” or naturalized fear of the Other.
22. See Leo Strauss’s “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,”
in the same volume, 81–108. Page 89 cited here.
23. See The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/article/Andrew-sullivan-over-
exposed/. The comments in particular demonstrate the delight many in the gay
community took in learning of the “moral” lapses committed by the poster child
of a conservative gay politic. To be fair, one can imagine scenarios where his bare-
backing as an HIV positive man put no one at risk except himself, which, Andrew,
is pretty immature.
24. For an analysis of the political naiveté and danger of espousing a genetic
basis for same-sex desire, see Brookey, 1–46. The title, which only speaks to male-
male same sex desire, implies that lesbians, while certainly not excluded from recent
research into the genetics of desire, have not yet been invented sufficiently to be
reinvented.
25. In season three Mora discovers that health issues and age disqualify her
from getting sexual reassignment surgery. At that point, her interest in woman’s
attire disappears.
26. Unclear is whether such a connection would qualify as ecogenetic (e.g.,
trauma from exposure to an environmental toxin) or epigenetic (methylated gene
trauma) which lacks transmission of any specific type of memory. Future research
is focused on treating the methylated gene.
http://discovermagazine.com/2013may21-grandmas-experiences-leave-epi
genetic-mark-on-your-genes. Research that considers if and how such a vocabu-
lary of the primal scene might write itself onto the methylated gene might begin
128 Notes to Chapter 1

by considering Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and his discussion of phylogenetic

memory.
27. The keen analysis here is radically at odds with recent, very disturbing
comments allegedly made by Puar at Vassar College, during which visit she sug-
gested or did not deny rumors that Israelis were harvesting the organs of Palestinian
children. In other words, she was, if the following account is accurate, rehearsing
once again the long history of blood libel against the Jew. For a decent analysis of
the event see: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.705213.
28. See in particular, Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality
in War, Theory, and Comparative Work.
29. See, for example, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/31/
uganda-anti-gay-laws-lgbt-activists.
30. Much credit still goes to the volume edited by Alice Kuzniar, Outing
Goethe and His Age, for the recognition that male homo-sociality around 1800,
with its effusive displays of friendship, was tinged by the homoerotic. Also, see the
most helpful volumes by McLeod and Engelstein.
31. The “After” in the title points to a larger contribution of the volume,
namely that the history of sexuality is a moment that has been overcome or could
be. That is to say, sexuality as a series of acts comes to undo any possibility of
mapping a linear history. Foucault’s model is thus seen to invite its own deconstruc-
tion, serving as a reliable map of how sexuality came to be pathologized and how
to identify points of intervention to disrupt that history.
32. See Tobin, Brothers, 20–24.

Chapter 1

1. See Benshoff less for his critical review of the literature and more for a
catalogue of how a queer element persisted throughout the Golden Age of Hol-
lywood that was linked with the monster lurking within or about.
2. In the made-for-television film, Frankenstein: The True Story (screenplay
by Christopher Isherwood and his longtime partner Don Bachardy) the doctor has
a budding friendship with his creation, even attending the opera with him, until
the devolution of the monster’s appearance drives his creator and one-time buddy
to reject his monstrous companion.
3. References to the different editions of the text are denoted by the year
before the page number. For the most part, all citations are from the 1818 text.
4. For one, what the monster undergoes is mediated from the horrible vision
that “arose in [Mary Shelley’s] mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds
of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes-but acute mental vision . . . the hideous phan-
tasm of a man stretched out . . . frightful must it be” (ix). Beyond the translations
that occur onto the page, there are the repeated revisions and, most significantly,
 Notes to Chapter 1 129

the framing devices used in the novel itself, about which more will be said below.
Unless otherwise noted, references are to the 1831 version originally published by
Colburn and Bentley. The differences between the 1818 version and this one are
hardly insignificant. For example, the earlier edition grants the monster free will
while in the latter version he is much more a victim of circumstance and science.
That difference more than any other underwrites my decision to work as well with
the 1831 version. By regarding the monster as an inevitable expression of the many-
layered conflicts of the time, I find the latter version exposes the controls imposed
upon its destructive force in an attempt to secure the home front.
5. An interesting read is Botting, who sees the invitation to so many criti-
cal approaches by the text as part of the weft of the narrative. Likewise, Craig’s
dialogic analysis helps situate the various critical discourses that emerge from such
dialogic constructions.
6. For an alternative Lacanian reading, see Collings.
7. With respect to the geography itself and its political mappings, see Randel.
8. Crucial in this regard is Komisaruk: “A crisis of affect drives the tragedies
in Frankenstein, and the worst offenders come from ‘good homes.’ Despite evidence
that the bourgeois family breeds exclusionary attitudes at many levels, Mary Shelley’s
characters often regard it as an oasis of interpersonal affinities in an indifferent
world—a position the critic may identify with the author herself ” (409).
9. See May for a provocative reading of sibling rivalries in the text.
10. For an exploration of the complicated dynamics structuring parent/child
relations in the novel, see Claridge.
11. I am not the first, of course, to characterize the monster as emblematic
of a specifically modern condition. Moretti’s fine essay, “The Dialetic of Fear,” con-
nects Frankenstein and Dracula to particularly modern conditions: “The fear of the
bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. . . .”
“Born in the full spate of the industrial revolution,” Frankenstein tells the story of
the birth of the proletariat, who like the monster have neither name nor identity.
Dracula embodies the erotic fear of the era (Moretti 67). My reading replaces the
family as the locus of conflict, Moretti sees the two monsters as outcasts from the
great Victorian “corporation” where anyone who “breaks its bonds is done for”
(Moretti 84). I replace the corporation with the Swiss Family Frankenstein, which
locates the erotic within the family. Still, we both see pressures in the text to mar-
ginalize a particularly modern monster.
12. Gubar and Gilbert are equally necessary here in assessing the autobio-
graphical content of the novel. Among the many important indices for reading the
text offered here is the recognition that those critics who understand the novel as a
work of the female imagination fail to recognize its “literariness,” a self-consciousness
that accompanies the imagination, which means that the novel is an exercise in
and also of Romanticism. For example, Milton is rewritten by Shelley “to clarify
its meaning,” which for a woman is a journey through hell (Gubar 226). Or, more
130 Notes to Chapter 2

generally, the question pursued is: “What was the effect upon women writers of that
complex of culture myths summarized by Woolf as Milton’s bogey?” The emphasis
is on artistic survival for anyone surrounded by “patriarchal poetry” (Gilbert 213).
13. Important in this regard, especially for how it understands the rupture
brought about by male/male bonding is Daffron (418−25).
14. While there is no need to rehearse Shelley’s stance toward her novel in
the various introductions, the recasting of the introduction signals a continuously
shifting of the domestic terms to be settled or at issue in the novel. This, of course,
is not unexpected, given the disorder signaled by the monster and the upheavals
and displacements that follow.
15. For a reading that runs counter to mine and sees the novel as a critique
of Orientalism see Lew, 255−28.
16. What many have identified is sympathy, I have recast as self-pity. See
Marshall for an extended discussion of the role of sympathy in the novel.
17. For as clear as possible a demonstration of Fichte’s “Tathandlung” see von
Molnár, 29−57. My reading draws heavily upon this remarkably concise explanation.
18. For a longer discussion of how feminism and philosophy play out in
the novel see Yousef.

Chapter 2

1. Letter to Felix Mendelssohn of 8 July 1829, quoted in Werner (1963),

36–38. Mendelssohn did not completely fulfill his father’s request to drop the
Mendelssohn altogether and signed his card “Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.” His sister
remarked in a letter to him in 1831, “Bartholdy . . . this name we all dislike.”
(Mercer Taylor 21).
2. Important in this regard is Katz 80−103. A remarkable reading of Moses
Mendlessohn’s Jerusalem and how it actually renders Judaism unnecessarily redun-
dant and obsolete despite its professed aims can be found in Hess 91−136. Like-
wise, the account of anti-Jewish sentiments that included shipping them all off
to Madagascar to harvest coffee surfaces around these times. The horrors of the
next century have their roots already in the public discourses surrounding Jewish
emancipation. Noteworthy is that any possibility of irony in certain remarks such
as the following by Fichte, becomes quite literal during National Socialism: For a
Jew to become a German, “it is necessary to cut off all their heads in one night,
and to set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish
idea” (Fichte, GA 1/1 292−93).
3. The text could be read as well to register Chamisso’s own anxiety about
transforming himself from a Frenchman to a German. At a time when Chamisso is
thought to have feared that he was moving down in the world, the Jew is moving
up (Chamisso 766−67). These shifts in mobility present numerous possibilities for
 Notes to Chapter 2 131

ambiguity. It might no longer be possible to differentiate between Frenchman and

German, German and Jew, and even “straight” and “queer.” By revising and linking
notions of Jewishness and sexual errancy, the text thus serves to readjust axes of
differences for arresting, among other things, class mobility and its attendant confu-
sions. In other words, it expresses Chamisso’s own attempt to secure social standing
4. This is a mere reformulation of the repressive hypothesis. See Foucault,
History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 15−50.
5. “Apparatus” (“dispositif in French”), quite frequently used in Foucault’s
later texts, also seems to become just as nebulous with every use. Agamben offers the
following broad definition in an attempt to capture its many applications in these
later works: “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient,
determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or
discourses of living beings” (Agamben, What Is an Apparatus 14).
6. See Schorske for how Freud’s science is inextricably linked to his uncertain
status as a Jew and how those anxieties inform or adulterate his readings (Schorske
189−201).
7. See Edelman, Homographesis, 11−25.
8. Freud’s text, it must be pointed out, was intended as a defense of his
theory of libido against the competing theories of Carl Jung and Alfred Adler.
Melanie Klein’s work, of course, is organized around object relations and the incor-
poration of the death drive into the construction of the super ego. Klein’s placement
of the mother/infant relationship, particularly as it concerns the mother’s offering
or withholding her breast, set her at odds with strict Freudians for whom fears of
castration were primary. During the war years the British Pscyho-Analytic Society
debated to what extent Klein’s theories had strayed too far from Freud’s and no lon-
ger could be considered psychoanalysis. Instead, they decided to teach two schools
of thought: Freudianism and Kleinism. See Grosskurth 358−449.
9. “In truth Freud sees nothing and understands nothing. He has no idea
what a libidinal assemblage is, with all the machineries it brings into play, and all
the multiple loves” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 37). Whitney Davis
is essential reading for understanding how the visual dimension and actual drawing
of the dreams underwrites Freud’s analysis.
10. See Golman, New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/06/science/
as-a-therapist-freud-fell-short-scholars-find.html?pagewanted=all
11. The apparent success of the Berlin salons in bringing Jews and Germans
together has undergone several revisions since then to the point now that the hal-
cyon, if short-lived, friendship signaled by Germans visiting the salons of Berlin’s
leading Jewish women appears to be mostly fiction. See Weissberg, 24−43.
12. “Just as Jews and women are without extreme good and extreme evil, so
they neither show either gains or the depth of stupidity of which mankind is capable.
The specific kind of intelligence for which Jews and women alike are notorious is
due simply to the alertness of the exaggerated egotism; it is due, moreover, to the
132 Notes to Chapter 3

boundless capacity shown by both for pursuing any object with equal zeal, because
they have no intrinsic standard of value—nothing in their souls to judge of the
worthiness of any particular object” (Weiniger 317).
13. See Kohler for a discussion of W. von Humboldt’s 1809 program for
Jewish inclusion, 63−71.
14. See Chamisso’s remark at the end of the text: “Schlemihl’s experience
calls out to us: “Think on that which is solid!” (Chamisso 778) Also see Gray
for an analysis of Schlemihl’s excessive wealth in the context of Germany from
1770−1850, 244−61.
15. See Mosse 72−73, 13−14.
16. See, for example, Sadan (198−203).
17. See Wisse (126).
18. See, for example, White (224−25).
19. See Wisse for a discussion of the terms migrations, particularly p. 126.
20. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schlemihls_wundersame_Geschichteo.
hj
21. Bersani’s comments in The Freudian Body are instructive here: “Castas-
trophe is produced when violence stops, when the disclosures provoked by desire’s
mobility seek, as it were, to take place, to have a place” (Bersani, FB 70). For my
purposes, I read that place as the space of interiority that leads to branding the
queer-jew as permanently other.

Chapter 3

1. For an overview of previous interpretations, see William Ray, 521−46.

Attempts to align the essay with German romantic idealism go as far back at
least to Hanna Hellman, who in 1911 rediscovered the essay “Über das Mari-
onettentheater,” reprinted in Kleist’s Aufsatz ‘Über das Marionettentheater”: Studien
und Interprationen, ed. Helmut Sembdner, 17−31. For most of the last century, the
text was read in terms consistent with Hellman’s, most notably by Benno von Wiese,
“Das verlorene und das wieder zu findende Paradies: Eine Studie über den Begriff
der Anmut bei Goethe, Schiller und Kleist.” In the 1980s attention shifted to the
rhetorical structures of the text and debunking the bald assertions of the interlocu-
tors, most notably by Paul de Man, “Aesthetic Formalization in Kleists’ ‘Über das
Marionettentheater,’ ” and James Rushing, “The Limitations of the Fencing Bear.”
In the 1990s Gail Hart, “Anmuts Gender: The ‘Marionettentheater’ and Klesit’s
Revision of Anmut und Würde,” offered a feminist critique while Brittain Smith,
“Pas de Deux: Doing the Dialogic Dance in Kleist’s Fictitious Conversation ‘About
the Puppet Theater,’ ” focused on what he called the “dialogic dance,” that is, the
performative aspect of the text, to recover an interpretive thread. Two things are
apparent from this overview: (1) the history of the text’s reception parallels con-
 Notes to Chapter 3 133

temporary theoretical trends, and (2) more recent deconstructive exercises, such as
Hart’s “Anmuts Gender”; Helmut Schneider’s “Deconstruction of the Hermeneutic
Body: Kleist and the Discourse of Classical Aesthetics,” in The Body and the Text
in the Eighteenth Century; and Smith’s “Pas de Deux” all gesture toward homoerotic
undercurrents in the text. All future references to Schneider’s text are denoted by
“Schneider” followed by the page number.
2. All references to “Über das Marionettentheater” are to Heinrich von
Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Helmut Sembdner, 7th Edition, 4 vols. (Munich: Han-
ser, 1982), 3:338−45. All future references to Kleist are to this edition and are
denoted as “Kleist” followed by the page number.
3. While Michael Foucault traces the modern obsession with sex and sexual-
ity from the nineteenth century onward in volume 1—a cue followed by Sedgwick
Kosofsky, among others—my interest is trying to discover currents earlier in the
century that invited such an obsession. See Eve Sedgwick Kosofsky, Epistemology
of the Closet, for a focus on the later nineteenth century. This is not strictly a
genealogical approach but rather a recognition of how manifold the possibilities
were to discuss same-sex desire and thus eschew any canonization, so to speak, of
sexuality. The text, at one point, refers to the marionette as “Gliedermann” (Kleist,
342), literally man of members, which presumes at the very least the possibility of
dismemberment and even castration, although it would be a proleptic conceit to
consider the latter.
4. For the most concise formulation of how that which signifies nothing
has come to signify the homosexual, see D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes,
51−55. Of course, the same can be said about Jews, as Scholem points out, who
converted or assimilated during the nineteenth century of the so called Age of
Emancipation. See Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 131.
5. Sedgewick’s oft-noted chart that questions every assumption about sexual-
ity—partners, gender, roles, class, and so on—is intended to disable any discussion
of sexuality anchored to a binary understanding. It thus exposes how the entire idea
of concealment/unconcealment, which, she claims, is the epistemological crucible of
our time, conceals the very impossibility of any kind of secret linked to sexuality
since the content is too disparate to possess a univocal content (Epistemology 31).
6. Janet Haley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Femi-
nism rehearses all the rifts in feminist thought for the past twenty-five years or so
to argue for taking a break from feminism. These rifts include those with other
subdisciplines, such as queer studies, postcolonial studies, and African-American
studies. The point, in part, is to allow the conflicts to remain unresolved as a
healthy, pluralistic discourse. To take a break from queer studies would mean, as
I try to argue in summary fashion in the first part of this essay, to forego queer
reading as a means to foreground sexuality and to embrace queerness as a political
assault on identity politics. In this respect, I am interested in how disrespecting
hermeneutic protocols queer each and every text as it no longer seeks to silence
134 Notes to Chapter 3

and overcome differences between the reader and the text, but rather champions
such difference.
7. The elision of female (same-sex) sexuality in the literature of the time
can be addressed in part by thinking of masculinity, as proposed throughout, as
subjunctive.
8. Prosthetics is, of course, only one of many metaplasms that could fanci-
fully describe the mixing of parts, sounds, and meanings that a real employment
of “queer” would imply. Metathesis, for example, describes most often the inversion
of contiguous sounds (foliage). A queerness, as it were, is central to the function of
language or its transmission. An important example, at least for Americans, is the
word “ask,” which Chaucer, for example, spells as “ax.” (Oxford English Dictionary,
second edition, under “ask”)
9. “In fact, Platen is a man more of the rump than of the head. The name
‘man’ does not fit him at all; his love has a passive, Pythagorian character. He is a
Pathetikos in his poems, he is a woman, who at once defies the feminine and is also
a male tribade. . . . [I]n his “Liebhaberei’ I detect something untimely, namely, the
timid and coy parody of the high ancients . . . In antiquity such romantic spirits
were in keeping with the practices of the time and were displayed with heroic open-
ness. But the count frequently masks himself in pious feelings and so avoids any
mention of gender . . .” Heinrich Heine, “Die Bäder von Lucca,” 7.1:140−41. Male
tribadism is particularly apt in this context since it is coined by Heine after Kleist
had penned his text, just as homosexuality is coined decades after both authors’
texts. Thereby, I hope to highlight a certain absurdity, if you will, of reading sexual-
ity back onto a text written when sexuality was a meaningless term or construct.
10. Andreas Kraß, “Der Stachel im Fleische,” Literatur für Leser 307 (2008):
123−32. All future references to this essay are denoted by “Kraß,” followed by the
page number.
11. Textual narcissism, it should be clear, means finding one’s own premises
reflected in the text. “Das Marionettentheater” is particularly suited for such a
description, given, as we will see, how invested it is in the practices of reading. In
this regard, See Block, “Strings Attached: Interpretive Ruse in Kleist’s ‘Über das
Marionettentheater,’ ” 42−60. Such practices extend to the interlocutor’s interpreta-
tion of the examples they cite and the insistence that the other accept the proffered
reading. Otherness, expressed in this instance as stubborn resistance to interpretive
appropriation, is preserved by being unreadable.
12. Of course, the spiritless embody grace in Kleist’s text, whereas in Platen’s
poetry it is pompous and suffocating. The two need to be thought of together; that
is, how grace is suffocating if it preempts a fall, or what later in the essay I will
denote as a second fall in which men desire men.
13. Smith is particularly convincing in this regard, noting, for example, how
Herr C— snobbishly tilts his head upward when challenged by the narrator or how
the latter offers his story about the ephebe after his understanding of Genesis, (i.e.,
his Bildung,) has been challenged.
 Notes to Chapter 3 135

14. Not long before its appearance in the Abendblätter the Prussian state
had warned against he moral dangers of puppet theater, which were often places
to hook up with prostitutes. See Wild, Theater der Keuschkhei, 13−64. The journal
was also censored just before the appearance of “Das Marionettentheater.” See Block,
“Strings Attached . . . ,” 58.
15. All translations are mine.
16. See David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Jonathan
Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (1−19).
17. For a discussion of how Kleist’s couched references to Iffland’s sexual
proclivities is not supported by any vocabulary to describe such acts—if they even
occurred—between two men, see Paul Derks, Die Schande der heiligen Päderestie:
Homosexualität und Öffentlichkeit in der deutschen Literatur, 432−35. Gayle Rubin,
“Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” decouples
sexuality from gender and is thus relevant here. She renders “isms” in relationship
to sexuality impossible, since sexual acts are now a matter of dense contingencies,
and not even logically bound by a gender binary.
18. Asserting that some term or condition links the three major examples
of the text’s argument is hardly reliable. For example, passivity may be a common
thread. The lifeless marionette is manipulated by the machinist, as he is called. The
ephebe responds to the lifeless model of a Greek statue, whose aesthetic standard is
already in play even before he becomes conscious of his actions. And the fencing
bear impresses only insofar as he has an attacker. But such examples, even if such
links were convincing, are all products of a false consciousness. If a queer reading
seeks to install itself, it does so by seeing lifelessness as its form of production or
its ideal, a dead text that refuses to invite reading, which, paradoxically, disables
such a reading before it offers itself.
19. Derks traces how “platonic” became a term to describe behavior such as
Wincklemann’s in the attempt to purge it of any unseemliness (81−89). Of course,
it also evacuates the term of any meaning insofar as platonic love implies no touch-
ing. The love that dare not speak its name can only misname itself since there is
no term at the time to describe it.
20. Paul de Man’s “Rhetoric of Temporality” remains exemplary in exploring
the irony that results from such a temporal delay, 187−228.
21. There is obviously a Hegelian ring to this historical process, all the more
so since entry is through the back door. This recalls Hegel’s assertion that philosophy
is like the owl of Minerva; it arrives, in other words, after the fact.
22. “And the advantage of such a puppet over living dancers? The advantage?
First of all my good friend, a negative one: namely that it would be incapable of
affectation.”
23. As noted in the previous chapter, Freud distinguishes between a primary
narcissism, which is not linked to homosexuality and in which a child cathects itself
as a whole with a parent, and homosexual narcissism, which develops later, when
the subjects’ narcissism meets with “admonition of others.” This in turn, awakens
136 Notes to Chapter 4

a critical consciousness. Original sin and homosexual critical self-consciousness

are thus linked in Kleist (88−94). See also Michael Warner, “Homo-Narcissism,”
190−206.
24. Kraß’s phrase, “den Zahn in den Fuß . . . schlagen” (beat tooth into the
foot) indicates, with its play on the literal and figurative levels of language, how
original the difference is or how rooted it is in language itself.
25. Herr C— describes the ungraceful movements of contemporary dancers
as Mißgriffe, “Mistakes” or literally “misgrasps” (Kleist 342), which captures the dual
sense here that the interlocutors always grab the wrong things or understand each
other only in misunderstanding each other, “misgrasping” each other.

Chapter 4

1. Roland Barthes: A Lover’s Discourse, Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard,

New York 1978. All references are to this edition and are followed by the page
number.
2. Samuel Weber: Unwrapping Balzac, 163−67.
3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Goethes Werke, Vol. 6. Ed. Erich Trunz,
Hamburg: Christian 1968. All references are to this edition and are followed by
the page number.
4. See Reinhart, Mayer-Kalkus: “Werthers Krankheir zum Tode: Pathologie
und Familie in der Empfindsamkeit,” 120−44.
5. Singularity, not Hegelian generality, constitutes an absolute in its differ-
ence. See Weber: Benjamin’s–abilities. 297−308.
6. This formulation echoes unmistakably Deleuze, whom Barthes footnotes:
“All this comes from Deleuze’s account of the affirmation of the affirmation” (24).
See Gilles Deleuze: Nietzsche and Philosophy, 188−89.
7. Potentiality, which should not be confused with virtuality, distinguishes
Deleuze from Benjamin. In contradistinction to Deleuze, for whom virtuality comes
to be actualized as an integrated whole, Benjamin’s “now” is never present but always
divided. It is only potentially itself by not being itself, as an echo of itself which
has always been divided. See Weber, Benjamin’s–abilities, 51.
8. Guy Hocquenghem: Homosexual Desire, 79.
9. See the letter of March 15 in which Werther’s presence at the soiree of
Graf. C. . . . offends the upper classes. This, of course, is Werther’s read on his
criticism, and no doubt, the reason his person offends is tied less to his class than
to his ignorance of the significance of class. With regard to class and homosexual
desire, see Hucquenghem: Homosexual Desire, 93−112.
10. See Daniel Heller Roazen: Echolalias. On the Forgetting of Language, 12.
I am arguing that repetitions produced by affirmation of the eternal return of the
same render audible textual ghosts of an unwritten text.
 Notes to Chapter 4 137

11. “Exiguous” still apparently describes a space. I am suggesting two things

(1) the space is tremulous because the space marks the intersection of cross pur-
poses and thus is never stable, and (2) through repetition it is never truly a fixed
space but only potentially fixed. It is exiguous because whatever fixed potential it
has is very slight.
12. Leo Bersani: Homos, 88.
13. Hocquenghem: Homosexual Desire. 97−100.
14. Jane Brown argues that Goethe anticipates the language of psychoanal-
ysis. See “Goethe, Rousseau, the Novel and the Origins of Psychoanalysis” In:
Goethe Yearbook 12 (2004) 111−28. Freud, of course, is of the same mind. See
Avital Ronell: Dictations. On Haunted Writing. Lincoln 1986, 11−27. I prefer to
see Werther as both constituting the subject as a psychological being and contest-
ing that constitution.
15. The editor is the conscience of the text, or in psychoanalytic terms, its
super-ego.
16. The language of tears is now clearly ambiguous. Before it was a sign of
immediacy, now a modality of morality.
17. That is to say, one is always only before the law; the law is that one is
always before it. One could just as easily remark that the law is without content
and known only by or through its effects. Echoes of Kafka are not coincidental.
See Jacques Derrida: “Devant a loi,” 128−49.
18. Temporality has become a central concern of queer theory. See “Theoriz-
ing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion.” In: GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian
and Gay Studies. 13:2−3 (2007) 177−95.
19. Barthes: Incidents. Trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley 1992, 51−55, 59.
20. Barthes: Incidents, 51−52.
21. See Nietzsche: Ecce Homo. 6/3, 91−92.
22. Nietzsche: Also Sprach Zarathustra, 6/1, 163.
23. Nietzsche: Nachgelassene Schriften. Kritische Gesamausgabe, 8/3, 410.
24. Eve Sedgewick-Kosofsky brilliantly maps the relationship according to
the paranoid and certainly “homosexual” logic of Freud’s reading of Dr. Schreber.
The paranoid homosexual converts “I (a man) love him (a man)” into ‘I do not love
him,’ ‘I hate him,’ and ‘I love her’ and even ‘I do not love him. She loves him.’
Epistemology of the Closet, 161−62. “She,” we might speculate, is Cosima Wagner.
See Ecce Homo in edition cited above, 82, for substitution of the name Nietzsche
for Wagner.
25. See David Halperin: One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. The timeline
for the codification of homosexuality is a literal reading, of course, of Foucault’s
provocative thesis in the first volume of the History of Sexuality. That timeline can
be contested but not the philological evidence that tracks the first appearance of
the word “homosexual” in the OED to the end of the nineteenth century. Thomas
Lacquuer (Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud) suggests that
138 Notes to Chapter 4

codification of sexuality was already taking hold a century earlier. That would place
Goethe at the crossroads.
26. How such effects come to be constructed as unnatural is evident in
the regressive character of Werther’s desire that has him looking back to ancient
Greece and nor forward; thus, his love for Homer that is replaced by a passion for
the morbid and fraudulent Ossian. See Hocquenghen: Homosexual Desire, 107−08.
27. Taking my cue from Kuzniar’s Outing Goethe and His Age, I read for the
homoerotic overtones that are inseparable from the effusions of male/male friendship
that emerged during the Enlightenment and Storm and Stress.
28. “Ja, liebe Lotte. . . .” Is the letter to Lotte or is it Werther reporting to
Wilhelm what he wrote to her, will write to her? The letters before and after are
clearly addressed to Wilhelm. More important, they speak of her absence. In the
first, Werther cannot produce a portrait of her; in the one that follows, he vows
to see her less. Writing to Wilhelm is thus how one summons Lotte (Goethe 41).
29. Ibid., 640.
30. For the manner in which same-sex desire is essential to Goethe’s poetic
production see Susan Gustafson: Men Dating Men, 92−99.
31. See Tobin: “In and Against Nature: Goethe on Homosexuality and Het-
erosexuality,” 94−110.
32. D. A. Miller: Bringing out Roland Barthes, 37.
33. Since we are talking about discourse here, Jacques Derrida’s use of “itera-
tion” in Limited Inc. is instructive (47). The potential for that which is written to
be repeated means that the “now” of writing is always different from itself. That is
consistent with what I outlined as the temporal disjunction of both Barthes’s and
Goethe’s text in the introduction.
34. See Sedgewick-Kosofsky: Epistemology of the Closet, 100.
35. Die Briefe was published in 1803. Thus, it is a retrospective ordering of
Werther’s desire that enables it to accord to the logic of psychoanalysis.
36. One cannot repress resonances with “auf den Strich gehen” or to become
a prostitute. That renders thinking as a mode of prostituting oneself, of occupying
no position except that which is responsive to an Other and is never exact or stable,
irresistible in this context.
37. See Agamben, The Time that Remains. In his reading of Paul (and Benja-
min) and messianic time, he turns to Corinthians to describe what he calls “vocation”
and “revocation.” An example of how repetition occurs with a notable difference is
offered in the foundation, “those having wives be as not having wives, and those
weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing” (230). The logic
of either/or—one weeps or one does not weep—is replaced by something other
that echoes in and through language as a potentiality that is never actualized or is
actualized only in messianic time.
38. As Heller-Roazen argues, aleph cannot be pronounced because it repre-
sents no sound at all, yet in the Jewish tradition it is the “fundamental principle
 Notes to Chapter 5 139

of construction” (Heller-Roazen 21). Unlike aleph, the queer echo I am writing

about can be pronounced, but then it loses its character as something potential or
as something that both is and is not; and thus queer to itself.

Chapter 5

1. The short story is unequivocal in this respect. It begins with Ennis dream-
ing of Jack Twist, who is already dead (Proulx 1) and ends with a return to the
moment when Jack began appearing in his dreams (Proulx 27−28).
2. See Ebert, who “can imagine someone weeping at this film, identify-
ing with it, because he always wanted to stay in the marines, or be an artist or a
cabinetmaker.” Without fancying what it might mean to dream of being a life-long
marine while watching two cowboys screw on the big screen, it is clear that dis-
cussions about the gayness of the film presume some things that aren’t that clear:
(1) this is even a love story; (2) that “gay” is suitable or not anachronistic in this
context, particularly since “queer” is used instead. See Mendelsohn for an argument
of why it is indeed a gay film.
3. A possible explanation of the term is that “rose” applies to the appearance
of the anus and stemming to the penis that is inserted into the anus. In the short
story, Aguirre sees more than he does in the movie: “They believed themselves invis-
ible, not knowing Joe Aguirre had watched them through his 10 = 42 binoculars
for ten minutes one day, waiting . . . before bringing up that message that Jack’s
people had sent word that his Uncle Harold was in the hospital with pneumonia
and not expected to make it” (Proulx 7). Aguirre discourages Jack from visiting
his uncle. That is, whatever displeasure he expresses later about the activities of the
two hands on Brokeback Mountain, he seems by his discouraging Jack to leave
that he wants it to continue.
4. See Braun for a precise analysis of he how the panopticon enables and is
concomitant with the biopolitical regime. Agamben’s Homo Sacer remains one of the
most compelling recent study to link the biopolitical with the state of exception.
Neither, however, links these control mechanisms with sexuality.
5. My use of the term is consistent with how we tend to understand
Nachträglichkeit. Since poststructuralism has no epistemology or is devoid of con-
tent, the very manner in which the structure of inversion provides knowledge of
what comes to be known as homosexual makes the ironic used of the term help-
ful. My definition, of course, is dependent upon Sedgwick’s understanding of such
knowledge as “preterited” (Sedgwick 134), a term I will adopt. My use of “open
and empty secret” likewise comes from Sedgwick (Sedgwick, 164, 174−80.
6. Foucault links inversion to gender in the The History of Sexuality, Part
II (18−20). Judith Butler renders such a distinction between gender and sexuality
slippery at best. Gender expectations remake the body, just as the body engenders
140 Notes to Chapter 5

those expectations. See Hekma for the impossibility of a pure distinction between
gender and sexuality. Since there is no indication of gender reversal in the film, I
use the term “inversion,” albeit idiosyncratically, in terms of sexuality.
7. See Deleuze, “Masochism,” for how the father is always the hidden point
of reference and for how sadomascochim attempts to overcome the consequent
abjection through “deriding” the father (3−10). S/M is not an issue, at least not an
overt one here, but de-riding the father in the context of the Twists is potentially
productive. Jack never learns to ride rodeo from his father, who constantly derides
him. The question is then what happens to the father when the son literalizes the
term and rides (mounts) and de-rides (dismounts) another man, or vice versa?
8. This is another example of how sexuality obscures race. But at least he is
not queer to mountain country, which, I guess, means he is straight.
9. Randall comes onto Jack shortly thereafter, inviting him to spend some
time with him at a cabin: “We ought to do down there some weekend. Drink a
little whiskey, fish some. Get away, you know” (McMurtry and Ossana 2005, 76).
Dancing with Lashawn is also dancing with Randall. And true to the way things
come to be known in the film, Jack may have taken the bait. At the end of the
film, Jack’s father reports that Jack was no longer talking about setting up house
with Ennis but rather with another “fella [who was] goin’ a come up here with
him and build a place . . . some ranch neighbor of his down in Texas. He’s going
to split up with his wife and come back here” (90).
10. The sign is not readable in the film.
11. See Edelman for how a metaphorical logic seeks to contain and explain
heterosexuality. Equally significant is his reading of the primal scene in Freud’s
Wolfman, which, as even Freud acknowledges, demands that the representation
and interpretation of the scene precede the actual scene; i.e, it is manipulated a
posteriori. (Homographesis 174−91.)
12. See Hocquenghem for how psychoanalysis with it emphasis on castration
determines property rights (Hoqcuenghem 72−74).
13. My formulation draws heavily upon Agamben’s The Time that Remains, in
which the formulation of Messianic time is not a double negative but an “as not”
(Agamben, Time 22−26, 88). The short story offers the basis of my reason for using
the “not . . . not.” Ennis says, “I am not queer,” rather than “I ain’t no queer,” as
he does in the film. The double negative does not permit a simple affirmation of
the sort “I am queer.” Such terms are nevertheless senseless, given how easily Jack
and Ennis fuck with women. Queer just doesn’t cut it with Jack or Ennis; they are
something other, which requires reading the double negative as not just a positive.
14. A formulation reminiscent of Heidegger is intentional. If the closet is
the epistemological crucible of the our era, then concealment/unconcealment has
something of that same structure, which one would have to work out elsewhere
but clearly finds resonances in Sedgwick.
 Notes to Chapter 5 141

15. At some point, it would be interesting to consider Ennis in terms of the

sovereign and the state of exception, insofar as he is both inside and outside the
law he comes to enforce. That makes the notion of a closet all the more complex.
A question I leave unanswered is whether Ennis, who now drives the truck and
will soon come to occupy a space resistant to panoptic surveillance, is an example
of what Agamben in State of Exception, after Benjamin, calls a true state of excep-
tion in contradistinction to the one which installs the biopolitical regime or that
advocated by Carl Schmitt (Agamben, State of Exception, 1−31.)
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 Index

Agamben, Giorgio, xxii, xxiii, xxv Briefe über die Glalanterie, 46

Agape, 15–17 Brooks, Peter, 4–5
AIDS, xxxi–xxxvi, xliii, xliv, lxvi, 24, Brown, Jane, 20, 22
27, 103, 120 Bug chasers, xxxii, xxvii, xxviii
America, xvi, xlvii, l, li, lii, lvi, 76,
103, 104, 109, 114, 120, 123 Cartesian cogito, xxxiii, xxxvi.
Androgyny, 13 Castration, 33, 83, 90, 96
Arendt, Hannah, 38, 51–52 Chamisso, Adalbert, lv, 31, 32, 35, 37,
Aristotle, 22, 24, 27 43, 46; Peter Schlemihl, 29–54
Chow, Rey, li
Balzac, Honorè de, 77 Cixous, Hélène, 33–34
Barebacking, xvii, xlvii Closet, 87, 101, 119–121, 123
Barthes, Roland, 101, 119, lvi; A Cohn, Dorritt, xvi, xviii, xxvi
Lover’s Discourse, lvi, 56–77, 119 Congress of Vienna, 42
Bashing, 51, 114, 118 Coitus-a-tegro, 105, 117
Beachey, Robert, lii Coming-out, 70, 103, 104, 107, 123
Belatedness, xxxviii, 18 Condon, Bill, 126
Benjamin, Walter, vii Counter-temporality, 78, 120; -rhythm,
Berlant, Lauren, xxxviii 102
Bersani, Leo, xxvi, xxviii, xxix, xxxvii– Crimp, Douglas, xxxiii, xxvii
xliii, 14, 107, 117
Bildung, 7, 41, 95 Dappled, xix, xxiv, xlii, 2, 119
Biopolitical, xxvii, 74, 102, 108, 114, Death drive, xxiii, xxvii, li, 6, 16, 20,
120 27, 104
Bloch, Ernst, xiii Delaney, Samuel, xxxviii, xlv, xlviii
Broadway, xxxv–xxxvi, xxxviii, xli Deleuze, Gilles, xix, 81; and Guattari,
Bredbeck, Gregory, 47, 108 Félix, xxxiv
Brokeback Mountain, lvl, 75, 101, 103, de Man, Paul, 67, 72
104, 107, 110, 113–114, 116–118, Derks, Paul, 64
120–122 Derrida, Jacques, xxiv, xxxi, xxxiv

153
154 Index

Desire, xiv, xv, xxi, xxv, xxv, xxxvii, Goethe, Johann, xx, lv, lvi, 20–22, 24;
xl, xli, xlvii, xlix, l, lii, liii, liv, 2, 5, Briefe aus der Schweiz, 94–97, The
11, 15–17, 20, 22–25, 30–34, 39, Sorrows of Young Werther, xxxvi, liv,
44–45, 47–53, 56, 62, 69, 79–80, lv, lvi, 75–100, 102, 119
82, 83, 85, 87–97, 104–106, Grace, 23, 58, 61–73
108–112, 116, 122 Grattenauer, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich,
Diderot, Denis, 24 39
Dinshaw, Carolyn, xxi, xii
Dohm, Christian Wilhelm, 41 Hadley, Wayne, xxx
Duyfhuizen, Bernhard, 8, 10 Haller, Albrecht von, 48
Halley, Janet, xlviii, 56
Edelman, Lee, xxi, xxii, xxv, xxxviii, Halperin, Daniel, xxxiv–xxxvi, xxxviii,
131, 140 xxxxix
El Reno Federal Corrections Hamlet, xxv
Institution, xiii Halberstam, Judith, xxi
Enlightenment, 29, 41, 44, 46, 48, 53 Heine, Heinrich, xlv, 45–46, 51,
Eros, xiv, xv, xvii, xl, xli, xlv, xlviii, lii, 57–59, 63–64
12, 15, 16, 18, 22–23, 34, 95, 97, Hekma, Gerd, 44
102–104, 106 Hep Hep Riots, 46
Hermeneutic, xxiii, 57–58, 65–67,
Family Values, xx, 23, 24, 101 70–71
First Amendment Defense Act, 19 Heteronormative, xii, xxxvi, li, 25,
Foucault, Michel, lii, 26, 30, 55; 110, 114
Discipline and Punishment, liii; Hirschfeld, Magnus, xlix, lii
History of Sexuality, liii, 45 Hocquenghem, Guy, 83, 104
Freccero, Carla, xxi, 69–79, 81, 83 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 32; The Sandman,
French Revolution, 18, 21, 57 33–35; Adventures of New Year’s Eve,
Freud, Sigmund, xvii, liii, 32; “The 35–37, 39, 54
Uncanny,” 33; Three Case Studies, Homo sacer, xxvii, xliv
34–35; “On Narcissism,” 48, 49, 56 Homonormative, xxii, xxxiv, li
Future perfect, xxiv, 98, 99, 121; Hull, Isabel, 44, 45
anterior, 98–99, 121 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 41, 48, 53
Hyperreal, 117–118
Garcia Düttmann, Alexander, xxx–xvi,
xliii India, 24
Gay outlaw, xxii, xvii, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, Interiority, xxxv, xxxvi, xlii, 19–20,
xliii, xliv, xlvii, liv, 31, 51, 92 22–23, 25, 32, 36, 56, 68, 84, 87,
Gide, André, xxxix, xl, 85 102
Gift giver, xxvii Inversion, xli, 31, 39, 40, 44, 47
Godzilla, 20, 23, 24 67, 69 70, 84, 93, 102–104, 106,
Good Morning America, xlv 111–113, 115–117, 120–122
 Index 155

Jagosse, Annamarie, xxiv Messianic, xiii, xviii, xx, xxi, xiv, xxvi,
Jew, liv, lv, 29–32, 36, 38–40, 48, xlvi, xlvii, liii, lvii, 30, 32, 34–36,
50–53, 56, 101; Jew hatred, 49– 54, 74–75, 77, 98, 101–102, 104,
52 110
Johnson, Barbara, 13–15 Metoplasm, 52
Miller, D. A., xxv–xxxvi, 23, 96, 97
Klein, Melanie, 33 Milner, Jean Claude, xxxii
Kleist, Heinrich von, lvl; “On the Milton, John, 2, 5
Puppet Theater,” lvi, 56–77, 119 Mirror image, 35, 36, 66
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 79, 89, Monster, 25–27, 30–31, 35, 40, 53,
91, 92, 95 78, 84
Klossowski, Pierre, 96 Mooney, James, xxviii
Knigge, Adolf Franz Friedrich Ludwig Morris, Paul; Plantin’ Seed, xxvi
Freiherr von, 38 Muñoz, José Esteban, xxiii, xxxiv, xxv
Krafft–Ebing, Richard, liii
Kraß, Adreas, 57–58, 62–73, 75 Nachträglichkeit, 33, 96
Kristeva, Julia, 17, 26, 27–28 NAMES Project, xviii, xix–xxx, 27
Nancy, Jean-Luc, xxxiv, xliv
Lacan, Jacques, xxvii National Socialism, xlii, xlix
Law of the father, xlii, 17, 18, 22, Nealon, Christopher, xxi
106, 115 New York Times, 120
Linnæus, 48, 53 Nietzsche, Friedrich, lvi, 82–83;
Eternal return of the same, 79–81,
Magnus Hirschfeld Institute, xlix, lii 94; Nietzschean ass, 80–83, 88
Mahler, Gustav, xviii
Male tribadism, lv, 55, 57–58, 60, Obama, Barrack, xxiii
62–65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 74 Oedipus, 34; Oedipal, 5, 7, 16, 17, 19
Mann, Thomas; “Death in Venice,” Ohi, Kevin, xxxvii–xxxviii
xiii, xiv, xvii, xx, xvi, xlii, 58, 89, Oral sex, 106
119; Tadzio, xiii, xiv, xvi, xviii, xiv, Orlando, FL, l
xxvi, xxxiv, xl, l, 119 Ossana, Diana. See McMurtry, Larry
Marlboro man, 113
Marriage, xx, xxv, xxxix, xlv, xlviii, lvi, Pahl, Katrin, xxv
15, 16, 103, 119 Panopticon, xx, xl, xliv, liv, 26, 31,
Masochism, xviii 104, 121, 122
Matricide, 12–17, 23, 27 Pentecost, 105, 112–113
McMurtry, Larry, 105, 107, 109–116, Performative, 55, 58, 61, 67, 77, 122,
118–119, 122 123
Melville, Herman; “Bartleby the Pfuhl, Ernst von, 62
Scrivener,” 122 Platen, Carl Gustav von, 57–58, 64
Mendelssohn Bartheldy, Felix, 29–30 Plato, xiv, 79, 87
156 Index

Polymorphous, 96, 104 Schwerpunkt, 63–67, 69

Polyopton, 11, 40 SCOTUS, xxi, xxvi, xli, xliv
Post-structural epistemology, 106–110 Sedgwick Kosofsky, Eve, xlii, xliii, 45
Potentiality, xxii–xiv, xxvi, xxx, xxxvii– Sentimental, xxxvi, 78, 91, 93, 96, 97
xxxviii, lii, lv, lvi, 20, 26, 78, 83, Sexology, lii, 2, 20, 24
93, 96, 99, 102, 117, 119 Sexuality, xv, lii, liii, lv, 17, 31, 37,
PREP, xxviii 55, 56, 57–60, 62–63, 96, 97, 101,
Primal scene, ix, 13, 33–34, 92 103, 104, 120; heterosexuality, xl,
Prosopopoeia, xlix, 3–4 xlviii; homosexuality, xxxiii, xxxix,
Prosthetic, lv, 55–57, 59, 63, 65, 69, xl, xlvii, xlviii, lv, 31, 33, 34, 44,
71, 74 46, 48, 49, 62, 68, 103, 106, 108,
Protease inhibitors, 43 111–112, 114, 116, 118, 119, 122
Proulx, Annie, 104, 107, 115, 122 Shadow, xxx, xliii, 30, 34, 35, 36, 38,
Proust, Marcel, xl, xlii 41–45, 47–52, 110; Eigenschatten,
Psychoanalysis, lii, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 35–36; Schlagschatten, 35–37, 47, 54
23, 25, 32, 33, 49, 53, 77, 89 Sheep, 103, 105, 108–109, 112, 114,
PTA, xxxix, li 117, 119
Puar, Jasbir, li–lii Shelley, Mary, liv, 2, 3, 7, 11–12,
17–18; Frankenstein, liii–lvi, 1–31,
Queer, xiii, xiii, xiv xii, xx, xxi, xxv, 35–37, 40, 53, 77–78, 84, 120
xvi, xviii, xxx, xxxiii, xxiv, xxxv, Sherwin, Paul, 19
xxxvii, xxxviii, xxxlv, xlvi, xlvii, Silken cord, 5, 10, 15
xlviii, l, li, lii, lii, liv, lv, lvi, lviii, lx, Spector, Scott, liii
lxii, 19, 20, 22, 47, 48, 50, 54–56, Stonewall, xxxv, xxxvi, lvi, 23, 75, 103
66–76, 78, 82, 90–91, 93–94, 97, Sullivan, Andrew, xlvi–xlvii
99, 102–105, 107, 108–109, 114,
116, 118, 119–120, 122 Talmud, xxvi
Taxonomy, 53
Rainbow flag, xxxix, xliii Taylor, Elizabeth, xxviii
Religious freedom, xxxix, xlvii Terrorist, xliii, l, li, lii, 101
Repression, 22, 34 Thanatos, 16
Robinson, Clarence, Jr., xxx–xxxi Times Square, xxxviii, xliv–xlv, 48
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 22 Tobin, Robert, 46, 95
Rüling, Anna, liii Trump, Donald, xxi
Transparent, xlix–l
Schelling, Friedrich, xxxiii
Schiller, Friedrich, 67 Uganda, lii
Schlemiel, 30, 44, 46, 47, 51, 96 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, lii
Schneider, Helmut, 58, 65, 66–69,
71–72 Varnhagen, Rahel, 51–52
Scholem, Gershom, xxv, xxxvi, 41 Vedeer, William, 11–13, 19, 22–23
 Index 157

Virgil, xliii Warner, Michael, xlvi, xlvii, 53

Visconti, Luchino; Death in Venice “Water Walkin’ Jesus,” 105
(film), xviii, xx, 2 Weber, Samuel, 77
Volk, 29, 42, 44, 45, 54, 60 Weil, Jiri, 29–30
Weininger, Otto, 4
Wagner, Richard 29, 93 Whale, James, 1–2, 26
Wandering Jew, 43 White House, xxxix, xliii
Warm brothers, 40, 46, lv Wretch, 7–10, 12–14, 21, 39–40, 84