need to re eval how we think abt things through phallicized whiteness – retag this lol

To queer freedom is not to disavow the political work of calling out the power differentials buried in these identity categories: it is not to return us to the allegedly neutral space of ‘the human.’ To queer freedom is, on the contrary, to deepen our grasp of the historicity of these categories. The conflation of dominant subjectivities with the posture of neutrality that we find in our contemporary cultures of phallicized whiteness did not occur recently. It reaches back, at a minimum, to the emergence of classical liberalism in the seventeenth century and its valorization of particular kinds of labor, rationality, temporality—and thereby of particular bodies, particular identities. We need to return to those roots of classical liberalism and trace out its subtle valorization of these characteristics, if we are to historicize the categories of identity that have since become some of its best tools.27 This work of historicizing our categories of identity is, among other activities, the work of queering freedom. It will both give us a deeper sense of how these categories emerged and show how the categories themselves intersect and interact to perpetuate the systems of domination in which we now find ourselves living. I develop much of this through the logic of the limit, a kind of logic that binds classical liberalism to phallicized whiteness through the shared value of individualism—a cornerstone, in turn, of advanced capitalism. Individualism simultaneously demands two apparently contradictory moves: 1) that we transcend material differences and understand ourselves as “just human”; and 2) that we conceive of ourselves through the rigid categories of identity that lock us into raced, sexed, classed (and so on) individuals. Individualism demands both identity and difference: the first of these perpetuates the Myth of Sameness, while the second reduces our subjectivities to the delimited categories of difference. But these categories of difference are ultimately that which must be transcended—erased—if we are to ascend into the treasured neutrality of humanity. And, even more perniciously, these categories of difference only lock us into politics of alleged resistance, wherein difference is pitted against difference (e.g., the old story of race or gender), while the one who transcends such differences altogether walks away unscathed. In Hegelian parlance, difference is always only mediated by identity here. The logic of the limit shows how these concepts of identity and difference are ultimately two sides of the same coin—namely, the currency of phallicized whiteness. It also rings a loud cautionary note about the viability of any politics of resistance that grounds itself in identity. The logic of the limit thereby helps to excavate how classical liberalism presents a hollow concept of freedom. In classical liberalism, freedom holds itself out as the transgression of boundaries and liberation from constraint. For example, we might think that we will liberate ourselves from domination if we engage in transgressive behaviors that violate our designated race, sex, gender, class, nationality, or religion. But the logic of the limit shows, as Bataille and Foucault among others also see, that such notions of freedom as the transgression of boundaries or liberation from constraint only enmesh us further in the very systems of domination we seek to resist. To queer freedom we must learn not only to resist the limited notions of difference enacted in categories of identity, but to resist differently altogether.